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University of Texas Bulletin 

No. 2060: October 25, 1920 



ROSSETTI THE POET 

AN APPRECIATION 
BY 



ALBERT EDMUND TROMBLY 

Adjunct Professor of Romance Languages 







PUBLISHED BY 

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS 
AUSTIN 



Publications of the University of Texas 



Publications Committee 



Frederic Duncalf 
Killis Campbell 
D. B. Casteel 
F. W. Graff 



C. T. Gray 
E. J. Mathews 
C. E. Rowe 
A. E. Trombly 



The University publishes bulletins six times a month, 
so numbered that the first two digits of the number show 
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series. (For example, No. 1701 is the first bulletin of the 
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request. All communications about University publications 
should be addressed to University Publications, University 
of Texas, Austin. 



1472-7456-3-7-21-1000 



University of Texas Bulletin 

No. 2060: October 25, 1920 



ROSSETTI THE POET 

AN APPRECIATION 



ALBERT EDMUND TROMBLY 

Adjunct Professor of Romance Languages 




PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY SIX TIMES A MONTH. AND ENTERED AS 

SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POSTOFFICE AT AUSTIN, TEXAS. 

UNDER THE ACT OF AUGUST 24, 1912 






The benefits of education and of 
useful knowledge, generally diffused 
through a community, are essential 
to the preservation of a free govern- 
ment. 

Sam Houston 



Cultivated mind is the guardian 
genius of democracy. ... It is the 
only dictator that freemen acknowl- 
edge and the only security that free- 
men desire. 

Mirabeau B. Lamar 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1 

.JUL 211921 

POCUiV 'ON 



ROSSETTI THE POET 

AN APPRECIATION 



By 
ALBERT EDMUND TROMBLY 



To 

Antoinette De Coursey Patterson 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 10 

Chapter 

I Fundamental Brainwork 13 

II Craftsmanship 29 

III Translations 41 

IV The Lyrics 50 

V Narrative Poems 60 

VI Mysticism 69 

VII The House of Life 73 

VIII Conclusion 84 



Chapters I, II, III, IV and VI have already appeared in 
The South Atlantic Quarterly. 



AN ECHO FROM THE HOUSE OF LIFE* 

There is a spring within an English wood, 
The sweetest and the clearest in the land. 
Around it myrtle and the laurel stand 
And shade it with their leafy plenitude. 
Italian skies above that fountain brood ; 
And Dante's foot is printed in the sand 
Beneath the crystal depth; and love's own hand 
Has fashioned it and lent it tone and mood. 

And yesterday 'twas there I stooped and drank, 

I, toiler in the house of life, to sate 

A thirsting heart I could not understand. 

And as I rose and turned me from the bank, 

I ran to her and knocked upon her gate, 

And cried : "My Love," and took her by the hand. 



*Reprinted from The Madrigal. 



INTRODUCTION 

In the writing of this essay, I have been guided by the 
conviction that criticism should grow out of enthusiasm. It 
should be not merely analytical, but also constructive and 
sympathetic. Whatever else may be said for or against this 
book, it will be clear, I think, that it is the outgrowth of 
an enthusiasm. My main purpose is to enjoy Rossetti with 
my reader ; other considerations are secondary. 

I shall endeavor to present a fresh appreciation of my 
subject, — an appreciation which is not particularly mind- 
ful of what has been thought, said, and mooted about Ros- 
setti in the past. So I have no other bibliography to offer 
than this — Rossetti's poems ; but these I have read, re-read, 
and lived ; and what I present in this volume, and I do it very 
humbly, is my reaction to those poems, and,- in a sense, my 
re-creation of them. It is this sort of thing which I mean 
and understand by literary criticism. 

My method has been to examine these poems much as one 
might examine a book of which he did not know the author, 
nor when it was written, nor how, nor why ; that is I have 
tried to see them solely as poetry, as art, — as the expres- 
sion of a man's reaction to the beauty which he has experi- 
enced, — without concerning myself too much with the voice 
that uttered them. My business is with Rossetti's poems, 
and with him only in so far as he exists in them; but no 
one can read these poems without realizing that they are 
a very large part of the man. His personality has passed 
into them, has fashioned them out of itself; and that is why 
they are so vital, so unmistakably his. And yet, once more, 
if I have found Rossetti it is because he is to be found in 
his work. Without denying that both pleasure and profit 
may be got in the study of the relation of the biographical 
data and the product of an artist, such a poem as The 
Blessed Damosel neither gains nor loses as art in my esti- 
mation when I learn that it was done before the poet was 
twenty years old. I am satisfied that a poem be a poem 
regardless of the conditions under which it was produced. 



Rossetti the Poet 11 

This presentation will be the truth in so far as I have 
been able to perceive it. That it may not be another man's 
truth goes without saying; but it is mine. We must not 
forget that the impression made upon us by others depends 
as much upon our ability to see as it does upon theirs to 
appear. 

To speak of this or that poet as the greatest in an ab- 
solute sense is simply folly. A thing is great only in pro- 
portion as it is great to you or to me; nor need what is 
great to you be great to me. Values must always be relative 
despite all that the dogmatists may say to the contrary. 
If Rossetti seems to you to be a great poet, it is because he 
gives you in his poetry what you think great poetry should 
give. 

In the following pages, I have had occasion, naturally 
enough, to use the terms lyric and lyrical. A word by way 
of explanation may not be amiss. In using the two terms I 
have had in mind that lyric poetry differs from poetry which 
is lyrical in this respect, that in the former the poet's in- 
toxication arises out of what he has to say, while in the 
latter it is inherent in his manner of expression. There- 
fore, it will perhaps be clear that without being essentially 
lyrical, much of Rossetti's poetry is indeed lyric. 



CHAPTER I 

FUNDAMENTAL BRAINWORK 

"I shut myself in with my soul, 
And the shapes come eddying forth." 
(Fragment) 

"Conception .... Fundamental Brainwork, that is what 
makes the difference in art. Work your metal as much as 
you like, but first take care that it is gold and worth work- 
ing." So wrote Rossetti ; and by brainwork he meant that 
content of lyrical thought or mood which is susceptible of 
being shaped into poetry. 

The laws of physics and architecture cannot in them- 
selves make a building — there must also be the granite; 
and brainwork must be the structural stuff — the granite — 
out of which poetry is to be wrought. 

We are forever talking of great art, great music, great 
poetry, not knowing quite what we mean by great, nor ever 
quite agreeing as to what is great. That we should not 
agree is both natural and fortunate, for what appeals to 
you may leave me unmoved; yet I suspect that what we 
most often mean, when we say that this or that work of art 
is great, is that we find it well laden with fundamental 
brainwork. It is this quality which will wear best and 
longest; and therefore as our taste and understanding de- 
velop we gradually leave behind us those artists whose 
beauties were trivial and external, and take ultimate refuge 
there where Beauty is large and deep. In the end it is 
spiritual elbow-room which we need and seek, and the poet 
who can give it to us is sure of a niche in our hearts. 

A charge commonly brought against Rossetti is that he 
is difficult reading ; but the only ground that I can possibly 
find for the difficulty is this : he has solidity and core. We 
are like children, who, if they could, would disregard the 
substantial part of their fare and eat only sweetmeats : we 
dislike and avoid whatever is solid in our mental food. 



14 University of Texas Bulletin 

Now the only accusation, if accusation is the name for it, 
which can really be brought against Rossetti is that he is 
concentrated; but instead of condemning, we should praise 
him for it, and should be genuinely thankful that at least 
one poet has striven to give us pure gold; thankful that 
within one small volume can be contained all that he did. 

To say that Rossetti's public is restricted because of his 
narrow range would be specious. In his own chosen plot- 
that relation of man and woman which we call love — his 
position is unique; and that in itself should be an earnest 
for a large hearing. The simple truth is, since the truth 
must be told, that he is too full of thought to appeal to the 
many. "One benefit I do derive as a result of my method of 
composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the 
man does not live who could write what I have written more 
briefly than I have done." And it is precisely because his 
work is so condensed that Rossetti's readers are not numer- 
ous ; but, since he cared little for the suffrage of the public, 
why should we who love him care any more ? The true artist 
cannot be concerned with prostituting his talents to an 
undiscriminating public ; if he wins a hearing that is purely 
incidental: his sole duty is with himself, with Beauty, and 
with his best possible interpretation of her. 

I have spoken of brainwork as being a poem's content of 
lyrical thought or mood. Now let us see how Rossetti ex- 
emplifies this definition. Let us take first this sonnet in 
which the content is lyrical thought. Excellent as the poem 
is in itself, and indubitably stamped as Rossetti's by the 
imaginative quality of the sestette, it is not as peculiarly his 
as are the poems expressive of a mood. 



Rossetti the Poet 15 

"Think thou and act; tomorrow thou shalt die. 
Outstretched in the. sun's warmth upon the shore. 
Thou say'st: 'Man's measured path is all gone o'er; 
Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh, 
Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I 
Even I, am he whom it was destined for.' 
How should this be? Art thou then so much more 
Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby? 
Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound 
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ; 
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned. 
Miles and miles distant though the last line be, 
• And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, — 
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea." 

Now turn to a poem in which the content is lyrical mood. 
Spinoza speaks of emotions as being thoughts too obscure 
and ill-defined to become articulate; and it is in his ability 
to make intelligible to us emotions and moods so fine and 
so elusive that they escape most of us completely, that Ros- 
setti is unmatched. Others can grapple with concepts and 
ideas, but no poet of whom I am aware can mafce an ab- 
stract mood concrete as he can. See how, in this magnificent 
sonnet, he renders articulate emotions roused by music 
heard, emotions which in most mortals can evoke nothing 
but silence not that we would not speak, but that we could 
not if we would. 

"Is it the moved air or the moving sound 

That is Life's self and draws my life from me, 

And by instinct ineffable decree 

Holds my breath quailing on the bitter bound? 

Nay, is it Life or Death, thus thunder-crown'd, 

That mid the tide of all emergency 

Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea 

Its difficult eddies labor in the ground.? 

Oh! what is this that knows the road I came, 

The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 

The lifted shifted steeps and all the way? — 

That draws round me at last this wind-warm space, 

And in regenerate rapture turns my face 

Upon the devious coverts of dismay?" 



16 University of Texas Bulletin 

Imagination, atmosphere, and magic, are all closely allied 
in Rossetti, and whether occurring separately or in com- 
bination they make up a large proportion of the content of 
his poems. Imagination was one of his greatest gifts, and 
he trod in its ways with as sure a step as that with which 
most mortals walk their city streets. From the fact that he 
lived so entirely for and within his art, and from constant 
association with early Italian poetry and painting and with 
Old French literature, it was only natural that he should 
have been enamored of things mediaeval. It is in this effort 
to construct for himself an environment out of the past 
that he may be called an anachronism ; and that he succeeded 
in no small measure was thanks to his imagination. Hall 
Caine tells us that, on the occasion of his first visit to Ros- 
setti, after having spent the night amid censers, sacra- 
mental cups, and a host of other mediaeval objects, it was 
with a sense of relief that he greeted the out-of-doors again. 
As he puts it "outside the air breathed freely." 

There is often an element of surprise in Rossetti's imag- 
inative flights ; and however wide the sweep of his wings the 
flight is shorn of whatever might seem fantastic or gro- 
tesque by the flashes of verisimilitude which give a sense of 
reality to what is purely imaginative. 

Taking The Blessed Damosel as the point of departure in 
Rossetti's career as a poet, we find him equipped with a 
splendid technique, and with an imagination which he him- 
self never surpassed. Certain passages from this poem 
have been so often used to illustrate his imaginative powers, 
that it would be trite to cite them here were it not that I 
hope to show how well the poet succeeded in lending a sense 
of reality to them. 

If we take out of their context, as is so often done, the 
verses which tell that from the bar on which she leaned the 
damosel was 

"So high, that looking downward thence 
She scarce could see the sun" 



Rossetti the Poet 17 

there is a feeling of hanging in the air; if we give those 
verses their place in the- stanza which contains them, we 
realize a sense of satisfaction that 

"It was the rampart of God's house 
That she was standing on" 

and the "rampart of God's house" affords a base from which 
the imagination may move with surer foot and wing. And 
what the "rampart" does for this stanza, the "bridge" does 
for the next. It is from the "bridge" as a starting point 
that 

"this earth 
Spins like a fretful midge." 

It is with such bits of verisimilitude that, throughout 
his work, Rossetti gives to his imaginative flights a sense of 
reality and truth which makes them the more startling and 
the more overwhelming. 

There are times too when his imagination takes a turn 
which is more subtle, more elusive, and often very poig- 
nant. In The Blessed Damosel the poet is telling that to the 
maiden it seems as if she had been in heaven but a single 
day, while in reality she has been there for ten years ; and 

"(To one, it is ten years of years, 
. . . .Yet now, and in this place, 
Surely she leaned o'er me — her hair 
Fell all about my face. . . . 
Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves. 
The whole year sets apace.)" 

Here the starting point of the flight is "the autum fall 
of leaves" ; but this time the effect is more vague, and, per- 
haps for that very reason, more poignant, and gives the 
feeling of half -remembered music or of the sound of a bell 
caught in the wind's lull so indistinctly as to make one 
wonder whether it is real or imagined. There is the feeling 
too of being brought face to face with an occult revelation. 
At sight and sound of falling leaves, the poet suddenly be- 



18 University of Texas Bulletin 

holds a casement flung open in the blue dome of God's house 
and the magnificent dream flashes upon his inner eye. 

Something of the same feeling is conveyed by the last 
verse of this stanza of The Staff and Scrip, in which the 
queen is described as placing above her bed the staff and 
scrip of the knight whom she had loved and who had given 
his life for her. 

"That night they hung above her bed, 
Till morning wet with tears. 
Year after year above her head 
Her bed his token wears, 
Five years, ten years." 

What long years are these — years of yearning and of 
patient hope, intolerable years, did they not hold out the 
promise of ultimate solace and peace. Yet only the supreme 
artist, the artist who takes into account his readers' as well 
as his own imagination could have achieved the effect which 
we get here. A lesser poet would have given us a detailed 
description of those years, but Rossetti knew that he could 
best make us know of them by leaving them to us. Such 
passages are numerous indeed, but I must content myself 
with the two following; from The Love-Letter, 

"And her breast's secrets peered into her breast" 

and from The Birth Bond, 

"0 born with me somewhere that men forget." 

The suggestiveness of such a verse as this last cannot be 
compassed quite, but resembles that of the alluring vistas 
which we catch in certain of Rossetti's paintings, vistas of 
distant fairylands seen through an open window or door. 

There is a convincing quality in Rossetti's imagination, 
due, sometimes to the skillful intermixture of verisimili- 
tude, as has already been pointed out, and often to the 
underlying matter of sense experience. The purely fanciful 
does not enter in; what the poet sees, he sees not only as 
the thing in itself, but also as that of which it is capable. 



Rossetti the Poet 19 

Herein lies the power of the creative artist. Looking off 
to sea on a day of "heaf* fogs" the poet notices that the 
sky-line is lost and that sea and sky seem to rise as a single 
wall. Out of that visual experience he spins this imagina- 
tive web, strikingly imaginative, yet wholly tangent with 
the initial experience and shaping its wings of the very 
stuff of other common human experience, the sight of flies 
dropping from a wall as they die. 

"But the sea stands spread 
As one wall with the flat skies, 
Where the lean black craft like flies 
Seem well-nigh stagnated, 
Soon to drop off dead." 

This takes us naturally enough to a consideration of the 
imaginative element in Rossetti's figures of speech, that ele- 
ment which because of its profusion is sometimes distract- 
ing, but into which is condensed so much of what the poet 
had to say. Original, surely, is this from The Portrait, 
though not distracting; and in its calm and melancholy 
beauty, unsurpassed. 

"Here with her face doth memory sit 
Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, 
Till other eyes shall look from it, 
Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, 
Even than the old gaze tenderer: 
While hopes and aims long lost with her 
Stand round her image side by side, 
hike tombs of pilgrims that have died 
About the Holy Sepulchre." 

From Rose Mary is a beautiful but much less striking bit. 
"Slowly fades the sun from the wall 
Till day lies dead on the sun dial." 

The same poem contains this : 

"The hours and minutes seemed to whir 
In a clanging swarm that deafened her." 



20 University of Texas Bulletin 

Reminiscent, perhaps, of the appearance of the angel in 
the opening of canto II of the Purgatorio is this couplet 
from The White Ship. 

"At last the morning; rose on the sea 
Like an angel's wing that beat tow'rds me." 

In The Dark Glass, love is characterized as being 

"the last relay 
And ultimate outpost of eternity" 

while the lover, as compared with love, is 

"One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand 
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand." 

And here, in The One Hope, we have one of those flights, so 
novel and yet so satisfying, which Rossetti alone could have 
achieved. 

"Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet?" 

There are two factors of Rossetti's writings of which 
one must speak here, for they are so largely the product of 
his imagination : I mean his magic and his atmosphere. 
He was exceedingly fond of the ghostly and supernatural; 
and for magic he admired Keats, and thought Coleridge one 
of the greatest of English poets. In the beautiful prose* 
tale which he has left us — Hand and Soul — he describes a 
young artist as painting his soul which had appeared to him 
in the semblance of a woman ; and in the fragmentary tale, 
called St. Agnes of Intercession, a young English painter is 
described as finding in an Italian gallery his own likeness 
and that of his sweetheart in portraits painted by an early 
Italian of himself and of the woman he loved. Such com- 
positions are sufficiently replete with wonder ; yet the high- 
water mark of Rossetti's magic is reached in Sister Helen. 
The theme of the poem is weird in itself and the splendid 



*Such writing as Hand omd Soul will be denied the name "poetry" 
only by those who demand that poetry be in verse. 



Rossetti the Poet 21 

handling only heightens the effect. Helen has been deceived 
by her lover, and on the very day on which he is to marry 
her rival, she avenges herself by destroying him body 
and soul. To accomplish this, she resorts to a piece of 
witchcraft, known and practiced in her day, which consisted 
of burning in effigy the person to be destroyed. The fiendish 
ruthlessness with which Helen carries out her purpose, 
though the damnation of her lover involve her own, shows 
how the sorcery has operated even upon her. She has become 
as one possessed and is more witch than woman. See with 
what satanic satisfaction she gloats over the agony of her 
rival, when the latter comes to implore mercy for her lover. 

" 'A lady's here, by a dark steed brought, 
Sister Helen, 

So darkly clad, I saw her not.' 

'See her now or never see her ought, 
Little brother!' 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 

What more to see, between Hell and Heaven!) 

'Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair 
Sister Helen, 

On the Lady of Ewern's golden hair.' 

'Blest hour of my power and her despair, 
Little brother!' 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 

Hour blest and bann'd, between Hell and Heaven!) 



'She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon, 
Sister Helen, — 

She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.' 

'Oh! might I but hear her soul's blithe tune, 
Little brother!' 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 

Her woe's dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!) 

'They've caught her to Westholm's saddle-bow, 
Sister Helen, 

And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.' 

'Let it turn whiter than winter snow, 
Little brother!' 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 

Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)" 



22 University of Texas Bulletin 

And when the wax image is entirely consumed and the 
lover's lost soul is borne by on the wind, the force of the 
witchcraft is spent and Helen emerges from witch to woman 
again only to realize that all is lost, even her own soul. 

" 'Ah ! what white thing at the door has cross'd, 
Sister Helen, 

Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?" 

'A soul that's lost as mine is lost, 
Little brother.' 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 

Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)" t 

In Rose Mary and Eden Bower the effect is attained, in 
the first case through the struggle of the girl against the 
spirits of evil contained in the beryl-stone, and in the latter 
poem by the yielding of Lilith to the snake element in her 
nature. The notes for the A proposed poems, Michael Scott's 
Wooing and The Orchard Pit, show that magic was to be the 
keynote of both. Tis a pity that they were never written. 
The few stanzas which we have of The Orchard Pit make us 
know something of what we have missed, and show clearly 
what the tone of the poem would have been. Take these as 
illustrative. 

"Piled deep below the screening apple-branch 

They lie with bitter apples in their hands; 

And some are only ancient bones that blanch, 

And some had ships that last year's wind did launch, 

And some were yesterday the lords of lands. 

In the soft dell, among the apple-trees, 
High up above the pit she stands, 
And there forever sings, who gave to these, 
That lie below, her magic hour of ease, 
And those her apples holden in their hands. 

This in my dreams is shown me; and her hair 
Crosses my lips and draws my burning breath; 
Her song spreads golden wings upon the air, 
Life's eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair, 
And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death." 



Rossetti the Poet 23 

Magic is a note to which Rossetti returns again and again, 
and we may find many snatches of it throughout his poems. 
This from The Bride's Prelude is unusually fine. 

"I woke at midnight, cold and dazed; 
Because I found myself 
Seated upright, with bosom bare, 
Upon my bed, combing my hair, 
Ready to go, I knew not where." 

That surely gives one the right thrill and throws open to 
the imagination the avenues of wonderland ! Here is another 
bit, this time from The Portrait, which suggests the paint- 
ing entitled How They Met Themselves. This picture is of 
two lovers, who, walking by night in a grove, are warned of 
impending death by suddenly meeting face to face the ghosts 
of themselves. 

"a covert place 
Where you might think to find a din 
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame 
Wandering, and many a shape whose name 
Not itself knoweth, and old dew, 
And your own footsteps meeting you, 
And all things going as they came." 

Magic and atmosphere are often very much at one; but 
perhaps we may say, though only in a very general way, 
that magic has to do with the struggle of the individual 
against some elusive and occult power, while atmosphere is 
the reflection of the state of a soul, on exterior things. 

None surely of the longer poems is more the product of 
atmosphere than The Bride's Prelude. Just how Rossetti 
would have ended the poem, which was left fragmentary, it 
might be hard to say* ; but the clouds which have been 
gathering are surely storm-clouds, and the lightening flashes 
and the thunder groans. The situation becomes increasingly 
tense, and the crisis, had it come, must needs have been 



*He has left a prose sketch of a proposed ending but how the 
finished poem would have compared with this sketch is impossible 
to tell. 



24 University of Texas Bulletin 

sudden and violent. The Bride is about to be married to the 
man who had seduced and forsaken her, the man who had 
caused her such anguish that her child had been still-born, 
the man whom she has learned to hate and who has come 
back to marry her only for his own advantage. Before the 
wedding takes place the Bride feels that she must unbosom 
herself of her unhappy past to her sister who is just back 
from a convent and quite ignorant of the misfortune which 
has befallen the Bride. The distress of these two girls, — 
of the one because she must confess, of the other because 
she must hear what costs so much to confess, — is tenseness 
itself ; and of this we are made aware, not by being told in 
so many words, but by finding it reflected in their reaction 
to their surroundings and in the correspondence of those 
surroundings with their own inner selves. 

" 'Sister.' said busy Ameiotte 

To listless Aloyse; 

'Along your wedding road the wheat 

Bends as to hear your horse's feet, 

And the noonday stands still for heat.' " 

In this very first stanza, we already know something, and 
it is a considerable something of these women, simply be- 
cause the one is "busy" and the other "listless." And how 
much the listlessness of Aloyse is heightened by the wheat's 
bending to hear her horse's feet, and by the noonday's stand- 
ing still for heat ! And here is a splendid glimpse into the 
nature of the sister to whom the Bride felt she must confess: 
Among other objects is 

"A slim-curved lute, which now, 
At Amelotte's sudden passing there, 
Was swept in somewise unaware, 
And shook to music the close air." » 

How could the Bride keep a secret from the girl at whose 
mere passing the lute-strings are stirred? And it is not be- 
cause Ameiotte is an inquisitive newsgatherer but only be- 
cause she is strong and of a largeness of sympathy which 
unwittingly elicits confidence. The noonday heat is op- 



Rossetti the Poet 25 

pressive ; but see how much more oppressive it becomes be- 
cause the heart-sick Bride projects herself upon it! 

"Beneath the drooping brows, the stir 
Of thought made noonday heavier. 

Long sat she silent; and then raised 
Her head, with such a gasp 
As while she summoned breath to speak 
Fanned high that furnace in the cheek 
But sucked the heart-pulse cold and weak." 

And see how her sad heart has colored the past seasons of 
her youth. 

"(Oh gather round her now, all ye 
Past seasons of her fear, — 
Sick springs, and summers deadly cold! 
To flight your hovering wings unfold, 
For now your secret shall be told. 

Ye many sunlights, barbed with darts 
Of dread detecting flame, — 
Gaunt moonlights that like sentinels 
Went past with iron clank of bells, — 
Draw round and render up your spells!)" 

The Bride is about to speak, and is summoning all pos- 
sible courage, but the silence itself weighs upon her and 
only renders her agony more acute. That moment is one of 
those in which seconds seem like minutes and minutes like 
hours, a subtle and awesome moment in which the scales are 
turned by a bird's song. The string cannot be tightened any 
more : either it is attuned or it must break. 

"A bird had out its song and ceased 
Ere the bride spoke." 

To make her sister's confession less painful, Amelotte avoids 
looking at her and conceals her own face in her hands. 
How intent she is upon hearing is reflected in her immo- 
bility. 



26 University of Texas Bulletin 

"The bride took breath to pause; and turned 
Her gaze where Amelotte 
Knelt, — the gold hair upon her back 
Quite still in all its threads, — the track 
Of her still shadow sharp and black." 

To listen to such a tale would in itself have been trying 
enough, but to listen without being able to see the speaker 
and to wait through the pauses was well-neigh terror. 

"That listening without sight had grown 
To stealthly dread; and now 
That the one sound she had to mark 
Left her alone too, she was stark 
Afraid, as children in the dark. 

Her fingers felt her temples beat: 
Then came that brain-sickness 
Which thinks to scream and murmureth; 
And pent between her hands the breath 
Was damp against her face like death." 

Shame is a denizen of dark recesses and flees before sun- 
shine as Satan is said to do at sight of a cross. 

"Where Amelotte was sitting, all 

The light and warmth of day 

Were so upon her without shade, 

That the thing seemed by sunshine made 

Most foul and wanton to be said." 

And once more we may know how stilly and oppressive 
this noonday is. 

"Through the bride's lattice there crept in 
At whiles (from where the train 
Of minstrels, till the marriage-call 
Loitered at windows of the wall,) 
Stray lute-notes, sweet and musical. 

They clung in the green growths and moss 

Against the outside stone; 

Low like dirge-wail or requiem 

They murmured, lost 'twixt leaf and stem: 

There was no wind to carry them. 



Rossetti the Poet 27 

We need not stop for illustrations of his atmosphere from 
others of Rossetti's poems : the Bride's Prelude has afforded 
us a sufficient store. And this atmosphere we have seen to 
be a subtle tone by which we may know a mood, for example, 
without being told of it. It is an analysis or presentation 
of the mood's reflection rather than of the mood itself. 

I have hinted before at Rossetti's power to depict emo- 
tions. It is a unique note with him and one of his most 
characteristic. Moods are so much a part of him, so vital 
and keen a part of him, that he can articulate them per- 
fectly. And the very fact, that in his painting, as in his 
poetry, he was forever concerned with the picturing of 
moods, made for that clearness and precision of presenta- 
tion which are peculiar to him. Mood with him meant the 
soul become articulate, the soul reaching out to "the ultimate 
outpost of eternity ;" and Art could not be the expression of 
anything less. That is why his achievement is always at so 
high a level: it is the interpretation of ecstacy; nay, it is 
ecstacy itself. And because ecstacy is momentary and must 
be caught in a breath, the lyric is its proper instrument, 
and Rossetti a lyric poet. His language may not always be 
spontaneous, in fact it rarely is; yet his inspiration is not 
only spontaneous, but deep-rooted and authentic; and the 
best possible prooof of it is to be found in the large number 
of excellent sonnets which he has written. When one has 
molded his initial impulse into a good sonnet and a good 
poem, the core of his inspiration must indeed have been 
large and solid to withstand the shaping which the form 
has imposed upon it. So form, by the way, may be, among 
other things, an excellent acid with which the poet can try 
out his substance. 

Mood is the stuff of poetry as action is of drama or clear 
sequence of logic; and it is mood which we have in the 
"perfect grief" of The Woodspurge, the listlessness of Au- 
tumn Idleness, the intense yearning of Broken Music, the 
despair of Lost On Both Sides, and in the bulk of what Ros- 
setti has left us. And as those conflicting hopes which, in 



28 University of Texas Bulletin 

their quest for peace, only frustrate one another, so will the 
writers who heed other voices than those of the moods, fall 
short of their goal — Poetry, wander aimlessly, 

"and wind among 
Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns." 



CHAPTER II 

CRAFTSMANSHIP 

"A sonnet is a moment's monument, — 

Memorial from the Soul's eternity 

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, 

Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, 

Of its own arduous fulness reverent: 

Carve it in ivory or in ebony, 

As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see 

Its flowering crest impearled and orient. 

A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals 

The soul, — its converse, to what Power 'tis due: — 

Whether for tribute to the august appeals 

Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, 

It serve; or 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, 

In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death." 

It would be difficult indeed to find any precise literary 
influences in the work of Rossetti. One rarely meets with 
so original an artist. He was too strong, I might almost 
say too dominant a man' to borrow much from others. At 
least one writer has sought to establish Rossetti's indebted- 
ness to Dante ; but perhaps the only sane comparison which 
could be made between these two would be one of personal- 
ities. Both were born leaders of men, both were creatures 
of strong emotions, artists thoroughly enamored of their 
art, and men given to melancholy contemplation. Yet Dante 
seems to have been shrewd, a man more like the generality 
of men, one whose daily life was very much like that of his 
fellows, and one intensely interested in the life about him, 
perhaps because it affected him so intimately. As artists, 
the two poets resemble each other. Both are masters of the 
tongue which they make their medium; both are fond of 
symbolism; both have sweet, yet strong and direct voices; 
both are mystics; and both excel in the use of figurative 
speech, and very markedly so in their use of verisimilitude. 
But that is as far as the comparison should go ; and as for 



30 University of Texas Bulletin 

borrowings from Dante, you will find none in Rossetti. 
What will perhaps remind you most often of Dante, in read- 
ing Rossetti, will be the highly colored mediaeval back- 
ground. In content the English poet has virtually nothing 
in common with the Florentine ; yet if one is bound to find 
resemblances the content of Rossetti's work is more like 
that of Petrarch's than that of Dante's. This resemblance 
is a natural enough condition. The majority of Petrarch's 
poems, like the majority of Rossetti's, were written in praise 
of woman ; and since Beauty, man's capacity for it, and the 
terms in which it can be expressed are about the same 
throughout human experience, is it to be wondered at if two 
poets say similar things, and in something of the same man- 
ner? In concluding this appropriately brief discussion of 
literary influences, I might say that while Dante distin- 
guished between the earthly and the heavenly Aphrodite, 
in both Petrarch and Rossetti the two are fused and be- 
come one. 

The predominant characteristics of Rossetti's language 
are melody, sonority, color, and virility. It is the combina- 
tion of these qualities which is peculiar to him and which 
makes his product unique. Melody we find in innumerable 
poets ; sonority and color in a Keats or a Yeats ; and virility 
in a Byron, a Browning, or a Swinburne; but all these 
qualities in a single poet, you find perhaps but once in a 
people's literature, and when you add directness and con- 
centration, then you must turn to Rossetti. How far his 
language was influenced by inherited tendencies and by as- 
sociations with Italian it would be impossible to say; but I 
think that there can be little question as to a resemblance 
between the sonorous elements of the two. He has certain 
expressions, too, which might be reminiscent of Italian 
phrases; I mean, for example, such an expression as "re- 
membering her" which savors rather strongly of ricordan- 
dosi. 

To the painter-poet's love of color, we may perhaps attri- 
bute his fondness for, and marvellous command of qualify- 
ing words : words deliberately chosen, but chosen out of an 
abundance and with an unparalleled sense for intrinsic 



Rossetti the Poet 31 

beauty and poetic suggestiveness. Take such words as 
these italicised here. 

"long known to thee 
By flying hair and fluttering hem 



How passionately and irretrievably 

In what fond flight, how many ways and days." 

"The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope" 

"And round their narrow lips the mold falls close" 

In the choice of the "mot juste," as the French Parnassians 
called it, I know of no poet who can afford the reader any- 
thing like the wealth of overwhelming and exhilarating sur- 
prises — the surprises which chill one's marrow — that are to 
be met with in Rossetti. In reading other poets you say, 
"how aptly chosen ;" but in Rossetti you say not only "how 
apt," but also "who but this man could or would have chosen 
such a word !" Take a few verses at random to illustrate 
what I mean. 

"This day at least was Summer's paramour, 
Sun-colored to the imperishable core" 

"How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh 
Tomorrow's dower by gage of yesterday" 

"Those unknown things or these things overknown" 

"Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes" 

"And in regenerate rapture turns my face 
Upon the devious coverts of dismay." 

The reader may better appreciate how much is gained in 
virility, conciseness, and suggestiveness, in such verses as 
the last two quoted above, if he will think to what length 
most poets would have spun out the matter which they con- 
tain. 



32 University of Texas Bulletin 

There is always the danger in art that the master of this 
or that phase of technique may lose his sense of proportion 
and become the slave of that of which he had been the 
master. Rossetti did not escape this danger altogether nor 
did he ever succumb to it to any great extent. His use of 
compound nouns and adjectives is sometimes too notice- 
able, but is not a serious offense. He risked more in shifting 
the tonic accent of words. It takes time to grow accustomed 
to "lif e-fountain ;" but on the other hand, one must confess 
that in many instances, as in "wingfeathers," the novel 
effect is altogether pleasing. Verses in which there is an 
annoying repetition of a sound are surely out of place in the 
sonnet. 

"Stoops as it swoops, with cheek that laughs and burns." 

But sins of this kind are few and surely negligible in view of 
Rossetti' s work as a whole. 

Despite the fact that much of his work is mediaeval in 
setting, his vocabulary does not contain many archaisms. 
His atmosphere, as has already been pointed out, he achieves 
not by the use of antiquated language, but by investing his 
scenery with moods, and by the skill with which he strikes 
the right key and then keeps to the pitch. Inversions he 
disliked and avoided, and it is pleasurable, to say the least, 
to read a poet whose delivery is so direct. 

No one has come away from a study of Plato and Dante 
without wondering at the splendor and originality of their 
figurative speech ; and it has long seemed to me that excel- 
lence in the use of such speech was a mark of real poetry. 
That Plato was a poet, and a great one, will be patent to all 
unless they exact versification of poetry ; for what poet has 
ever dreamed more beautiful dreams than those of the Sym- 
posium and the Phaedo, or a more elaborate one than that 
of the Republic. In beauty and originality of figurative 
speech Rossetti is surely akin to Plato. I have alluded be- 
fore to the strength and resemblance of Dante and Rossetti 
in their use of versimilitude ; and the reader of these poets 
is not likely to forget readily this from the Inferno 



Rossetti the Poet 33 

"Poi che Vun pie per girsene sospese 
Maometto mi disse esta parola" 

or things like the following, from sonnets of Rossetti : 

"The lost days of my life until today 

What were they, could I see them on the street 

Lie as they fell?" 

"Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air 
Between the scriptured petals softly blown 
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown" 

The comparison might be extended further, and we might 
say that both poets excelled markedly in the use of figura- 
tive speech in general; and since, in speaking of Rossetti's 
imagination, I treated of his use of verisimilitude, I hard- 
ly need add anything here. In his other figures of speech 
we shall meet with the same sort of surprise as that which 
we found in his "mot juste," only in a greater degree. See 
what picturesque imagery there is in figures like these ! 

"A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals 

The soul, — its converse, to what Power 'tis due" 

"On these debateable borders of the year 
Spring's foot half falters" 

"Alas for all 
The loves that from his hand proud Youth lets fall, 
Even as the beads of a told rosary!" 

And how profoundly and poignantly does this next delve 
into the past of our hearts, rouse regrets for our lost youth, 
and reanimate days and delights which had long been 
forgot ! 

"intense 
As instantaneous penetrating sense 
In Spring's birth-hour of other Springs gone by." 

There need be no dearth of illustrative matter in dealing 
with such a phase of Rossetti's genius at this. There is al- 



34 University of Texas Bulletin 

ways an abundance, and an abundance to spare. The only 
difficulty will come in limiting oneself to so little, when there 
is so much. 

There is nothing in Rossetti's life which would lead one 
to call him a lover of the out-of-doors — for most of his life 
was spent within a studio ; yet when he did come in contact 
with Nature, his eye was keen to observe and his heart to 
remember ; and what he saw with the outer eye, he colored 
with the eye of the imagination. 

"Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly 
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky" 

And what lover of Nature, poet though he might be, would 
have observed this ? 

"The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun, 

As if, being foresters of old, the sun 

Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves." 

Then for originality and remoteness from the commonplace 
of life, this figure is unique even among Rossetti's. 

"Even as, heavy-curled, 
Stooping against the wind, a charioteer 
Is snatched from out his chariot by the hair, 
So shall Time be; and as the void car, hurled 
Abroad by reinless steeds, even so the world." 

A notable feature of some of Rossetti's poems is the re- 
frain. The use of a refrain was far from being an innova- 
tion with him, but what was new was the way in which he 
used it. Others had used it for rhythmical effects, but in 
his hands it took on new possibilities and new functions. 
He makes it a sort of antistrophe, the subtle echo of the 
stanza, or the voice of a vague emotion either roused by the 
stanza or complementary to it. It resembles a dominant 
undertone in music, and is very suggestively described in 
his own definition of the refrain, in the translation of Vil- 
lon's ballade of the dead ladies, where he calls it an "over- 
word." A Death Parting exemplifies admirably the "over- 
word" type of Rossetti's refrains. 



.-. ■ Rossetti the Poet 35 

"Leaves and rain and the days of the year, 
(Water-willow and wellaway,) 
All these fall, and my soul gives ear, 
And she is hence who once was here. 
(With a wind blown night and day.) 

Ah! but now, for a secret sign, 
(The willow's wan and the water white,) 
In the held breath of the day's decline 
Her very face seemed pressed to mine. 
(With a wind blown day and night.) 

love, of my death my life is fain; 
(The willows wave on the water-way,) 
Your cheek and mine are cold in the rain, 
But warm they'll be when we meet again. 
(With a wind blown night and day.) 

Mists are heaved and cover the sky; 

(The willows wail in the waning light.) 

loose your lips, leave space for a sigh, — 

They seal my soul, I cannot die. 

(With a wind blown night and day.) 

Leaves and rain and the days of the year, 
(Water-willow and wellaway,) 
All still fall, and I still give ear, 
And she is hence, and I am here. 
(With a wind blown night and day.) 

In other poems — such as Troy Town, Eden Bower, and 
Sister Helen, — the refrain takes on a distinctly dramatic 
function and bears to the stanza and to the poem as a whole 
a relationship akin to that which the chorus bore to the 
main dialogue in the Greek classic tragedy. In Troy Toivn 
it lacks the musical qualities which Rossetti's refrains gen- 
erally possess ; but for all that it carries dramatic force and 
adds perceptibly to the climax of the poem. In fact much 
of the poem's significance hinges upon those words 

"0 Troy's down 
Tall Troy's on fire!" 

It is the love of Helen and Paris which will prove to be the 
bane of Troy, so when once that love is kindled, the town 
is doomed, and the imminence of its fate broods over it 



36 University of Texas Bulletin 

from the very first stanza. The poem gains in intensity 
too from the refrain-like repetition of "heart's desire." 

The refrain of Sister Helen changes from stanza to stanza 
to meet the demands made upon it by the progression of the 
poem; and in all of these poems the refrain — like a wave 
gathering violence with every dip — swells and accumulates 
the dramatic power until it breaks with the climax. The 
following stanzas from Eden Bower illustrate very forcibly 
the resemblance of the refrain to the Greek chorus. The 
main voice says : 

" 'Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam!' 

and the chorus : 

(And the bower and hour!) 

the main voice : t 

'Lo! sweet snake, the travail and treasure, — 
Two men-children born for their pleasure!' 

'The first is Cain and the second is Abel:' 

the chorus : *~ 

(Eden bower's in flower.) 

the main voice : 

'The soul of one shall be made thy brother, 

And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other!' 

the chorus : 

(And the bower and the hour!)" 

The sonnet must enter and take a large part in any dis- 
cussion of Rossetti's art, because it is a form for which his 
contemplative genius was particularly fitted, and one in 
which he is universally acknowledged to have been a master. 

In speaking of the sonnet we are altogether too much 
given to laying stress upon the rhymes, as if the fourteen 



Rossetti the Poet 37 

verses correctly rhymed constituted a sonnet. Happily the 
sonnet is something more than rhymes, and I shall try to 
show what Rossetti thought it to be. 

It might be extravagant to say that one feature of the 
sonnet is more important than another, so much is the effect 
of the whole dependent upon the proper balance and har- 
mony of its parts; but if not more important, its inner 
structure is surely full as important as its outer. Naturally, 
the fourteen verses, of a certain type, rhyming in a certain 
way, are the sonnet pattern; but they are not the sonnet. 
It is the material, the stuff of which one weaves that makes 
the difference in cloths ; and it is fundamental brainwork — 
intellectual and emotional — which really makes the differ- 
ence in sonnet writing. It goes without saying that you 
must weave your material before you have cloth, you must 
work according to a plan, a pattern ; and likewise in sonnet- 
writing you must adopt the given pattern, since what we 
mean by a sonnet is a poem whose externals are the four- 
teen verses, the rhymes and the rest. You may, in your 
iconoclasm, decide to call a stone a tree, and a twenty-verse 
composition a sonnet; but to most mortals a stone will re- 
main a stone and a sonnet a f ourteen-verse poem till dooms- 
day. 

It is well to remember that a thing may be poetic without 
being lyrical, or lyrical without being poetic. The poetic 
quality has to do with imaginative suggestiveness, the lyrical 
with spontaneity of expression. Now the sonnet is contem- 
plative rather than spontaneous, condensed rather than ef- 
fusive, forceful and poignant, yet restrained, subtle, and 
austere. 

Any attempt to prove the absolute superiority of the 
Petrarchan over the Shakespearian sonnet would be futile ; 
for the one is superior as a Petrarchan and the other as a 
Shakespearian sonnet. Relatively speaking, however, and 
with the qualities spoken of above as indispensable attri- 
butes, one must admit that the Petrarchan model has yielded 
the more satisfactory results. To say that the Shakes- 
pearian is incapable of the necessary qualities would be 
going too far ; but what can be safely said, I think, is that 



38 University of Texas Bulletin 

thus far,in the history of the sonnet in English literature, 
it has not achieved those Qualities. ! K it- was' never meant 
to, then the question is at an end; arid we may say that from 
the point of view of the sonnet as a poem excelling' in con- 
densation, sonority, restraint, and stateliness, the Petrar- 
chan model has been superior. Too often in the" Shakes- 
pearian sonnet the three quatrains haVe been mere bolster- 
ing for the crack of the whip of the more or less loosely con- 
nected couplet;' and this charge might well apply to many, 
very many, of the Elizabethan Sonnets, arid, with some 
grounds, even to that one of Drayton's which Rossetti him- 
self admired so much. What he found so admirable in it 
was doubtless the splendid analysis of a mood. 

To Rossetti the sonnet was almost always bipartite, as to 
both content and form ; and outwardly these two parts were 
octave and sestette. In many of his sonnets one of these 
parts presented the thesis of mood or thought, while the 
other gave his emotional reaction to it. Soul's Beauty illus- 
trates this type very well. ] In the octave we are shown who 
Lady Beauty is; and the sestette reveals how man reacts 
emotionally when brought in contact with her. Others of 
his sonnets present a theme from two different angles, as in 
that on the sonnet which heads this chapter. Of this sonnet, 
we can say further that it is the only sonnet on the sonnet 
which really tells us what the sonnet is. Wordsworth's 
"Scorn not the sonnet" is structurally a failure, and a 
mighty poor justification of the sonnet. It is not bipartite, 
has nothing of the advance and recoil movement, and in 
substance is merely a more or less imaginative statement of 
what part the sonnet has played in the production of certain 
poets. It contains, to be sure, the splendid verses on Dante, 
Spencer, and Milton; but were it not for these verses of 
saving grace, what would there be to the poem ? His sonnet 
beginning, "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," 
is structurally much better ; but that too gives us no inkling 
as to what the sonnet is. Eugene Lee-Hamilton's, "Four- 
teeen small broidered berries on the hem" is built very much 
like Wordsworth's "Scorn not the sonnet," in fact savors 
strongly of being an imitation of it, but gives us no more 



Rossetti the Poet 39 

idea of what the sonnet is than does Wordsworth's. 

Almost the same objection could be made to Gilder's 
"What is a sonnet?," except that it does suggest that a son- 
not is "a two-edged sword." But now turn to Rossetti's, 
and you will find not only the spiritual significance of the 
sonnet 

"A sonnet is a moment's monument 
Memorial from the soul's eternity 
To one dead deathless hour" 

but also the vital and primal element of its being : its face 
and converse. 

"A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals 

The soul,— its converse to what Power 'tis due." 

It is this bipartite nature, then, which is the true seal of the 
sonnet; and Rossetti's success as a sonneteer was due in no 
small part to the fact that he recognized and lived up to this 
truth. Of his sonnets, there are few indeed, (A Match With 
the Moon is an example) in which there is not a distinct 
recoil of the one part on the other. This bipartite feature 
has much to do with giving his sonnets their close-knit qual- 
ities. And with what an admirable sense of proportion the 
materials are distributed, so that no one part of the sonnet 
will be thin nor another too heavy ! With all their ornate- 
ness and elaborate details these sonnets stand solid, nobly 
erect, and splendidly poised. The emotional stress increases 
as the sonnet progresses, till, with the last verse, the heart 
of the reader is launched into the clear ether of the emotions 
and imagination. Here too the element of sonority is pres- 
ent and predominates as nowhere else in Rossetti's poems. 
To list the sonorous verses would be to list the great body of 
his sonnets; but many of them are not merely sonorous: 
they are unapproachable in their poetic and imaginative 
suggestiveness. 



40 University of Texas Bulletin 

"The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope" 

"Speechless while things forgotten call to us" 

"The very sky and sea-line of her soul" 

"Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream" 

"Shadows and shoals that edge eternity" 

"Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes" 

"The wandering of his feet perpetually." 

And these are only a few of the many. Tell me of another 
poet in whose work one can find verses like these — verses 
so intrinsically beautiful, so instinct with the breath of 
pure poetry, so vital and complete in themselves that they 
satisfy one as does an entire poem ! Surely, in such flights 
the poet has reached 

"The ultimate outpost of eternity." 

To me at least these verses mean more than do all possible 
''lyric cries." The "lyric cry" can rouse one, but it has no 
carrying power ; while Rossetti's verses lift and sustain one 
over unimagined waters to unimagined shores. I believe 
•that Rossetti is not only a master of the sonnet, but the 
greatest that we have had. 



CHAPTER III 

TRANSLATIONS 

"A little wild bird sometimes at my ear 
Sings his own little verses very clear: 
Others sing louder that I do not hear. 

For singing loudly is not singing well; 
But ever by the song that's soft and low 
The master-singer's voice is plain to tell. 
Few have it, and yet all are masters now, 
And each of them can trill out what he calls 
His ballads, canzonets, and madrigals. 

The world with masters is so cover'd o'er, 
There is no room for pupils any more." 

(Early Italian Poets — Anonymous ballata.) 

It is almost a commonplace that good translations of 
poetry are perhaps even more rare than poetry itself. The 
truth is that to be a good translator, one must be a poet; 
and poets — at least ours — rarely devote much of their effort 
to translation. They are so rapt in their own dreams that 
they look upon translation — if they condescend to it at all 
— as a thing to be done when inspiration for other work is 
lacking. Yet translation is not to be utterly despised, for 
it requires greater versatility and is far more difficult than 
is generally suspected. It is for this reason that we have 
so few first-class translations. We have some in which the 
foreign verse has been more or less successfully imitated; 
others in which the flavor of the original has survived ; but 
very few in which both are to be found, and fewer still 
which make English poetry. The reasons for these condi- 
tions are varied. In the first place the prosody of the one 
tongue may differ radically from that of the other ; second- 
ly, poets are forever striving for the "mot juste," a thing 
which is of the very essence of the language and virtually 



42 University of Texas Bulletin 

intranslatable ; and thirdly where atmosphere, that quality 
so dependent on the suggestive power of words, is to be ren- 
dered the difficulties become almost insurmountable. Con- 
sequently, almost the worst that can be said for verse trans- 
lations — and it is constantly saidi as- if it were a praise- 
worthy feature — is that they have been done in the original 
metres. Rarely, very rarely, you will find a writer who can 
make not only a metrical translation, but also a translation 
which is poetry. Rossetti is one of these. 

In the preface to The Early Italian Poets he says : "The 
life-blood of rhymed translation is this— that a good poem 
shall not be turned into a bad one" ; and it is for this very 
reason that those of us who have no access to Persian, for 
example, are not much concerned with the original of the 
Rubaiyat: we are satisfied that Fitzgerald's translation is 
a magnificent poem in itself. So with Rossetti's transla- 
tions; he has not only done justice to the originals, he has 
even improved upon them at times. In an endeavor to make 
his book comprehensive and really representative of the 
early poetry of Italy, he has included much which is of an 
inferior quality; but though the sources be indifferent the 
translations are always well done, and make us wonder at 
the patience and enthusiasm of the translator. Of poets be- 
fore Dante, there are very few — Fazio degli Uberti, Franco 
Sacchetti, and a half dozen others in an occasional poem — 
who were worthy of the translator. As to the "Vita 
Nuova," it is by far the finest thing in the book. Since the 
first appearance of Rossetti's volume in 1861, that little book 
of Dante's has been translated many times ; but the reader 
who would catch the spirit of Dante, and yet must forego 
the original, must go to Rossetti. Here the affinity of the 
two poets, Rossetti's love and understanding of Dante, his 
love of woman, his ability as poet, and his skill in catching 
and reproducing the spirit and letter of the original have 
made his the unmatched translation. 

"Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering 
is altogether secondary. ... I say literality — not fidelity, 
which is by no means the same thing." But read his trans- 
lations, and you will be surprised not only at their fidelity 



Rossetti the Poet 43 

but also at the remarkable degree of their literality. Com- 
parisons are rarely sane or justifiable; but with the orig- 
inal as a definite starting point and the endowing of a fresh 
nation "with one more possession of beauty" as , a goal, it 
is possible to measure the translator's achievement with 
his aim. Therefore, it will perhaps be profitable, and at 
least not altogether amiss, to compare Rossetti's with the 
translations of others. Here, for example, are the original, 
Byron's rendering, and that of Rossetti. 

"Quando risposi, cominciai : 'O lasso, 
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio 
Meno costoro al doloroso passo!' 
Poi mi rivolsi a loro, e parlai io, 
E cominciai: 'Francesca, i tuoi martiri 
A lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio. 
Ma dimmi: al tempo de' dolci sospiri, 
A che e come concedette amore, 
Che conoscesti i dubbiosi desiri?' 
Ed ella a me: 'Nessun maggior dolore, 
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice, 
Nella miseria; e cio sa il tuo dottore. 
Ma se a conoscer la prima radice 
Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, 
Faro come colui che piange e dice. 
Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto 
Di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse; 
Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto. 
Per phi fiate gli occhi ci sospinse 
Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso; 
Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. 
Quando leggemmo il disiato riso 
Esser b.iciato da cctanto amante, 
Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, 
La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante: 
Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse! 
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.' 
Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, 
L'altro piangeva si che di pietade 
lo venni men, cosi com' io morisse; 
E caddi, come corpo morto cade." 

(Inferno V, 112-142.) 



44 University of Texas Bulletin 

(Byron) 

" Alas! unto such ill 

How many sweet thoughts, what strong ecstasies, 

Led these their evil fortune to fulfill!' 

And then I turn'd unto their side my eyes, 

And said, 'Francesca, thy sad destinies 

Have made me sorrow till the tears arise. 

But tell me, in the season of sweet sighs, 

By what and how thy love to passion rose, 

So as his dim desires to recognize?' 

Then she to me: 'The greatest of all woes 

Is to remind us of our happy days 

In misery, and that thy teacher knows. 

But if to learn our passion's first root preys 

Upon thy spirit with such sympathy, 

I will do even as he who weeps and says. 

We read one day for pastime, seated nigh, 

Of Lancilot, how love enchain'd him too. 

We were alone, quite unsuspiciously. 

But oft our eyes met, and our cheeks in hue 

All o'er discolour'd by that reading were; 

But one point only wholly us o'erthrew; 

When we read the long-sigh'd-for smile of her, 

To be thus kiss'd by such devoted lover, 

He who from me can be divided ne'er 

Kissed my mouth, trembling in the act all over. 

Accursed was the book and he who wrote! 

That day no further leaf we did uncover.' — 

While thus one spirit told us of their lot, 

The other wept, so that with pity's thralls 

I swoon'd as if by death I had been smote, 

And fell down even as a dead body fall's." 



(Rossetti) 



"When I made answer, I began: 'Alas! 
How many sweet thoughts and how much desire 
Led these two onward to the dolorous pass!' 
Then turned to them, as who would fain inquire, 
And said: 'Francesca, these thine agonies 
Wring tears for pity and grief that they inspire:- 
But tell me, — in the season of sweet sighs, 
When and what way did Love instruct you so 
That he in your vain longings made you wise?' 
Then she to me: 'There is no greater woe 



Rossetti the Poet 45 

Than the remembrance brings of happy days 

In Misery; and this thy guide doth know. 

But if the first beginnings to retrace 

Of our sad love can yield thee solace here, 

So will I be as one that weeps and says. 

One day we read, for pastime and sweet cheer, 

Of Lancelot, how he found Love tyrannous: 

We were alone and without any fear. 

Our eyes were drawn together, reading thus, 

Full oft, and still our cheeks would pale and glow; 

But one sole point it was that conquered us. 

For when we read of that great lover, how 

He kissed the smile which he had longed to win, — 

Then he whom naught can sever from me now 

For ever, kissed my mouth, all quivering. 

A Galahalt was the book, and he that writ: 

Upon that day we read no more therein.' 

At the tale told, while one soul uttered it. 

The other wept: a pang so pitiable 

That I was seized, like death, in swooning fit, 

And even as a dead body falls, I fell." 

Byron's translation is not to be despised, though it has 
hardly been faithful to the verses of Dante. It lacks the 
simplicity and the delicate pathos of the original and quite 
misses the tone of it. And in spite of the fact that Byron 
claims to have done the passage "into cramp English, line 
for line, and rhyme for rhyme," it is quite evident in such 
verses as these that he has not been literal. 

"What strong ecstasies 
Led these their evil fortune to fulfill!" 

Then too he has too many inversions and too much which 
smacks of Pope and the eighteenth century. But I have al- 
ready pointed to the chief reason why he did not do justice 
to his original: it was too fine, too delicate for his rather 
crude hand. He was much better fitted for Pulci's Morgante 
than for the Francesca episode. 

Now if we turn to Rossetti's translation we shall see that 
in the very first tercet we have what is virtually a word for 
word rendering. And throughout, the passage is keyed to 
Dante's pathetic note and never once goes false. It is this 



46 University of Texas Bulletin 

very quality of fidelity, not only to the body, but also to the 
soul of his original that makes Rossetti excel as a translator. 
Byron is struggling with a metre which clearly is too much 
for him; while Rossetti takes it surprisingly easily. What 
of good there is in Byron's translation is Dante's; but in 
Rossetti's there is nothing which makes us feel that it is 
a translation. It has passed through the fibre of his person- 
ality and bears the stamp of it. If one objected that Byron's 
version was likewise stamped with his personality, then I 
would say "so much the worse for Byron; this is only one 
proof more of how ill-fitted he was to translate Dante." 

One wonders why anyone should need or dare translate 
Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis after it had once 
been done by Rossetti; and he wonders still more when he 
reads Andrew Lang's translation. Lang's facile verse could 
hardly have been less suitably employed anywhere. See, 
for instance, whether this stanza of Lang's does justice to 
Villon. 

"Nay, tell me now in what strange air 
The Roman Flora dwells today. 
Where Archippiada hides, and where 
Beautiful Thais has passed away? 
Whence answers Echo, afield, astray, 
By mere or stream, — around, below? 
Lovelier she than a woman of clay; » 

Nay, but where is the last year's snow?" 

"Dictes-moy^ ou, n'en quel pays, 

Est Flora, la belle Romaine; 

Archipiada, ne Thais, 

Qui fut sa cousine germaine; 

Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine 

Dessus riviere ou sus estan, 

Qui beaute eut trop plus qu'humaine? 

Mais ou sont les noiges d' antan!" 

Do you think, for example, that 

"Nay, tell me now in what strange air 
The Roman Flora dwells today" 



Rossetti the Poet 47 

says what Villon says in 

"Dictes-moy ou, n'en quel pays, 
Est Flora, la belle Romaine"? 

That "what strange air" is some distance away, to be sure, 
from "n'en quel pays!" And do you get in "Lovelier she 
than a woman of clay" even the clay of "Qui beaute eut 
trop plus qu'humaine?" This is being neither literal nor 
faithful to the spirit of the original. But consider Ros- 
setti's stanza. 

"Tell me now in what hidden way is 

Lady Flora the lovely Roman? 

Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, 

Neither of them the fairer woman? 

Where is Echo, beheld of no man, 

Only heard on river and mere, — 

She whose beauty was more than human?. . . 

But where are the snows of yesteryear?" 

Here surely is the voice of a master interpreting that of an- 
other. Take Lang's best verse "Nay, but where is the last 
year's snow," and it is trivial and choppy when compared 
with "But where are the snows of yesteryear." Then in Ros- 
setti's 

"Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, 
Neither of them the fairer woman" 

we have a splendidly suggestive interpretation of Villon's 

"Archipiada, ne Thais, 

Qui fut sa cousine germaine," 

one in which he makes the women's kinship one of beauty : 
Hipparchia is Thais' first cousin in beauty, that is, she is 
her equal, or as Rossetti puts it 

"Neither of them the fairer woman." 

The "envois" of the two translators need only be put side by 
side, without comment. 



48 University of Texas Bulletin 

(Lang) 

"Prince, all this week thou need'st not pray, 
Nor yet this year the thing to know. 
One burden answers, ever and aye, 
'Nay, but where is the last year's snow?" 

(Rossetti) 

"Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, 
1 Where they are gone, nor yet this year, 
Except with this for an overword, — 
But where are the snows of yesteryear?" 

In the last of the three major stanzas, where the poem's 
poignancy reaches its climax in 

"Ou sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine," 

Lang dawdles with his easy rhymes and takes no notice of 
this supreme cry, while Rossetti renders it thus admirably, 

"Mother of God, where are they then?" 

Enough of comparisons ; but before leaving Villon let me 
call my reader's attention to Rossetti's admirable rendering 
of a verse from the Lay ou Plustost Rondeau. 

"Deux estions, et n'avions qu'ung cueur" 
"Two we were, and the heart was one." 

In the translation of Villon's ballade and the Francesca 
episode we have veritable "tours de force." Surprisingly 
literal entirely faithful, they are splendid pieces of English 
poetry. I know of but one translation which can move and 
delight me as does the original, and that is Rossetti's version 
of Villon's ballade. 

I have said little enough of The Early Italian Poets but 
that little may be enough. The book contains Rossetti's 
version of the "Vita Nuova," and that in itself would make 
it worthwhile. The pity is that more of the poets repre- 
sented were not worthy of their translator — he who gave 
himself to them with such sympathy, enthusiasm, and self- 



Rossetti the Poet 49 

effacement, as only a great artist could give. In his pre- 
face he says ". . .1 know there is no great stir to be made 
by launching afresh, on high seas busy with new traffic, 
the ships which have been long out-stripped and the ensigns 
which are grown strange ;" and those memorable words may 
perhaps be answered in those of a scholar who said that 
many of us owed our first love of Italian poetry to Rossetti's 
beautiful book. In his translations, as in his original poetry, 
he showed that rare good sense which led him to select what 
was best suited to his beauty-loving, melancholy, and con- 
templative genius; and to this recognition of his power and 
limitations his art — including his translations — owes much 
of its merit. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE LYRICS 

"Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, 
A-top on the topmost twig — which the pluckers forgot somehow, — 
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now." 

It was perhaps impossible for the 19th century to judge 
or appreciate Rossetti, — the century which thought that 
it had found the Absolute in, what proved to be a half -god, 
science, and the dreamer who could live full as satisfac- 
torily whether the sun went round the earth or the earth 
round the sun. Today we realize that the Absolute is still 
at large, and we can see that the man, whom his contem- 
poraries called an anachronism, was really a priest of the 
one god which can satisfy the aspirations of man — Idealism. 

To his fellows intellectual meant scientific, and so they 
called him .sensuous. A voluptuary he surely was ; but so 
are all artists and mystics, even the ascetic to whom his 
very asceticism is a source of voluptuous pleasure. Yet 
Rossetti was not merely sensuous, and we shall see, if we 
have not already seen, that he was one of the most thought- 
ful of our lyrics poets. 

In imaginative power, technical skill, and perfect artic- 
ulation of a basic inspiration, he never surpassed in his later 
work what he had achieved in The Blessed Damosel. His 
added years gave him a more profound sense of the pathe- 
tic, a more searching analysis of moods, a greater wealth 
and depth of feeling; but the beginnings of all these qual- 
ities were already apparent in the product of his youth. 
What a beautiful dream is this of the maiden in heaven 
praying that her earthly lover may join her, and that there 
in God's sight their love, their earthly love, may be made 
eternal! And it is this very quality of earthliness which 
gives the poem its sympathetic and appealing note. Love, 
like Art and all other forms of religion is selfish, and what 
the lovers desire is, not a new and spiritual existence, but an 



Rossetti the Poet 51 

eternity of the love which they had known on earth. The 
maiden in heaven is still clothed in the beautiful body which 
her lover had known and loved. 

"And still she bowed herself and stooped 
Out of the circling charm; 
Until her bosom must have made 
The bar she leaned on warm." 

What a perfect mingling is this of the Pagan body and the 
Christian soul, of the earthly and heavenly Aphrodite, of 
Francesca and Beatrice! And to the poet, the lover, could 
any creed be more satisfying? Love to Rossetti was the 
summum bonum, the Absolute, 

"The ultimate outpost of eternity," 

and he recognized no creed but this. To love woman, or 
Art, or earth, was to love God himself. 

"Lady, I fain would tell how evermore 
Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor 
Thee from myself, neither our love from God." 

. The Portrait has a distinct kinship with The Blessed 
Damosel; but in the former it is the lover on earth who, 
gazing on the portrait which he had painted of his beloved, 
grieves for her who is now in heaven. There is about the 
poem a contemplative melancholy, as though the lover were 
sorrowing for one long since gone, and a music as of a re- 
quiem or far-away bells. What sad resignation, what keen 
and vain longing, what "perfect grief" in the closing 
stanza ! 

How strangely and sadly prophetic these poems appear 
to be! Written in his youth, they would seem to belong 
rather to the lonely years of his later life, when the poet 
and painter, mourning for the woman whom he had loved 
and lost, might say : 



52 University of Texas Bulletin 

"This is her picture as she was: 

It seems a thing to wonder on, 

As though mine image in the glass 

Should tarry when myself am gone. 

I gaze until she seems to stir. — 

Until mine eyes almost aver 

That now, even now, the sweet lips part 

To breathe the words of the sweet heart: — 

And yet the earth is over her." 

Not only is Rossetti thoughtful, but in 'some of his work 
he deals frankly with questions like those of life and death. 
He does not, in the manner of the metaphysician, postulate 
a hypothesis and then carry it out to a logical conclusion; 
but he does present a problem in such a way as to make us 
know what he has been thinking and to suggest new pos- 
sible avenues for our own thought. In The Card Dealer we 
learn that what we know as life and death are both but 
phases of a larger activity, a larger life; and the Card 
Dealer, in whom we recognize Fate, deals out impassively 
the cards which mean life or death for us. Perhaps, after 
all, the life and death of the individual are only kindred 
activities of the great Oversoul. 

The poem is terse and compact, and wrought of such 
beauty and imagination as this : 

"Could you not drink her gaze like wine? 

Yet though its splendors swoon 

Into the silence languidly 

As a tune into a tune, 

Those eyes unravel the coiled night 

And know the stars at noon." 

And there is a note of true magic in : 

"We play together, she and we, 
Within a vain strange land." 

There is not merely imaginative suggestivess in The Sea- 
Limits, but a core of solid thought. 

"Consider the sea's listless chime: 

Time's self it is, made audible, — 

The murmur of the earth's own shell." 



Rossetti the Poet 53 

As one might gather from the beach a shell and catch in 
its conch an echo of the sea's roar, so, if one could listen at 
the earth's shell, one would hear in the voices of wood, sea, 
and men kindred expression of the instinct to be. Man is 
no more a phase of life than are tree and wave. 

"Gather a shell from the strown beach 

And listen at its lips: they sigh 

The echo of the whole sea's speech. 

And all mankind is thus at heart 

Not anything but what thou art: 

And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each." 

Rossetti seems to have been forever fluctuating between 
an emotionalism, which looked to a life after death, and a 
sound practical sense which looked fact and truth full in the 
face, knew them for what they were and realized that all 
we actually know is that this life' is, and that it is because 
we sense that it is. Belief — for we have no knowledge of it 
— in a life other than this, in a better, a compensating life is 
the creed of those dissatisfied with the present life ; and in 
this belief Rossetti often indulged ; but in his saner, his in- 
tellectual moments, he looks not at but through hope, and 
sees man as a helpless mote momentarily expressing a grain 
of that activity which we call life. Nowhere has he more 
beautifully, clearly, forcibly, and completely enunciated this 
than in his matchless Cloud Confines; and that the poem has 
never been more popular is a sad commentary on the taste 
and intelligence of lovers of poetry. Who that has read such 
lines as these can ever forget them ? 

"War that shatters her slain, 

And peace that grinds them as grain." 

And if any verses whatsoever are worthy of remembrance 
or can be said to be inspired or to contain solid lyric 
thought, what of these ? 



54 University of Texas Bulletin 

"What of the heart of love 
That bleeds in thy breast, Man? — 
Thy kisses snatched 'neath the ban 
Of fangs that mock them above; 
Thy bells prolonged unto knells, 
Thy hope that a breath dispels, 
Thy bitter forlorn farewells 
And the empty echoes thereof? — 

Still we say as we go, — 
'Strange to think by the way, 
Whatever there is to know, 
That shall we know one day.' 

The sky leans dumb on the sea, 
Aweary with all its wings; 
And oh! the song the sea sings 
Is dark everlastingly, 
Our past is clean forgot, 
Our present is and is not, 
Our future's a sealed seedplot, 
And what betwixt them are we? — 

We who say as we go, — 
'Strange to think by the way, 
Whatever there is to know, 
That shall we know one day'." 

Such, I think, was Rossetti's creed ; and it would be well to 
remember that man's belief in life after death may mean to 
the artist potential poetic material rather than actual con- 
viction. Even broken-down creeds may not be devoid of 
beauty. 

These three poems, The Card Dealer, The Sea Limits, and 
Cloud Confines, I have chosen to speak of because they are 
among the finest of Rossetti's lyrics, and more particularly 
because their fundamental brainwork is thought, not emo- 
tion. That the thought has been emotionally fused and 
wrought goes without saying; else we would not have the 
perfect poems that these are. Yet, it is not in such per- 
formances alone, or even primarily, that his claim, and it 
is a very large one, to intellectuality lies, but also and 
rather in the analysis and portrayal of moods, of which 
I have already spoken and in which he excels so preem- 
inently. 



Rossetti the Roet 55 

Nothing could be truer to spiritual experience than such 
an emotion as that of which Sudden Light is fashioned. 
From the eyes of how many a lover has some veil fallen, 
when at a swallow's soar his beloved's "neck turned so!" 
And to one so suddenly, so subtly, so convincingly made 
aware of a former existence and a former love, what can 
there be but a questioning of the future ? 

"Has this been thus before? 

And shall not thus time's eddying flight 

Still with our lives cur loves restore 

In death's despite, 

And day and night yield one delight once more?" 

In the hedonistic enjoyment of the moment, comes the 
melancholy truth that life, whether it be of joy or of sorrow, 
is passing away; and even in love there must be the 
stoicism which can put by love when its hour has past. It 
is this sense of the immanence of sorrow in pleasure which 
makes A Little While one of the most poignant of Rossetti's 
lyrics. 

"Not yet the end: be our lips dumb 
In smiles a little season yet: 
I'll tell thee when the end is come, 
How we may best forget." 

Yet even though a man speak in that timeless and im- 
mortal tongue, fools will still label him "minor," "Vic- 
torian," and "anachronistic !" 

Here is a "landscape," presented within the narrow com- 
pass of two lines, which the greatest masters of perspective 
and color might envy, and the like of which they have per- 
haps never achieved ! 

"Tonight this sunset spreads two golden wings 
Cleaving the western sky." 

As one reads Sunset Wings, one feels and hears and sees 
the "winnowings of birds," the day's last hour dying "in 
rings of strenuous flight," "the sway of homeward pinions," 
"the clouds of starlings .... clamorous like mill- waters at 



56 University of Texas Bulletin 

wild play," the "wrangling rout" in the trees, the "whirr 
within," and the "one great puff of wings" with which "the 
swarm heaves away." Then the mind turning back, sees, 
through a heart full of sad yearning, in the flight of those 
rooks a commentary on human hope. What justness of ob- 
servation, what preciseness of color, what splendor of word- 
music in a masterpiece like this! And in the closing 
stanzas what supreme cry of regret, what choking tears 
for all that beauty which allures the heart, but which, alas, 
is so short-lived ! 

"And now the mustering rooks innumerable 
Together sail and soar, 

While for the day's death, like a tolling knell, 
Unto the heart they seem to cry, Farewell, 
No more, farewell, no more! 

Is Hope not plumed, as 'twere a fiery dart? 
And oh! thou dying day, 
Even as thou goest must she too depart, 
As sorrow fold such pinions on the heart 
As will not fly away?" 

The sonnets for pictures are a unique performance ; and 
it is interesting to note that the best of them, with but one 
or two exceptions, are those written for Rossetti's own pic- 
tures. It would seem that the initial inspiration had neither 
been fulfilled nor exhausted by the painting, and the poem 
must be written before the creative impulse could be satis- 
fied. And it is quite evident, if we look to such sonnets as 
Mary's Girlhood, Mary Magdalene, or Saint Luke the 
Painter, that the painting had in no wise spoilt the chance 
for the poem, for such sonnets are not merely actively in- 
spired — they are among the poet's best. 

Mary's Girlhood is inherent with homely virtue, benignity, 
peace of mind, and calm piety ; and in the sestette each new 
verse adds to the increasing quality of silence and awe, till 
in the last line we reach a perfect calm prophetic of a great 
strange dawn. These verses call to mind the sweet simple 
beauty of another of Rossetti's paintings, Ecce Ancilla 
Domini. 



Rossetti the Poet 57 

"So held she through her girlhood; as it were 
An angel-watered lily, that near God 
Grows and is quiet. Till one day at home 
She woke in her white bed, and had no fear 
At all, — yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed; 
Because the fulness of the time was come." 

Material facts are not in themselves of the essential stuff 
of poetry; and yet there is no reason why they must re- 
main foreign to it. They are potential raw material — the 
crude ore from which the poet must extract the pure gold 
before he can hope to utilize it in the jewel which he has 
dreamed. No one better than Rossetti could fuse facts into 
poetry ; and in Saint Luke the Painter the history of paint- 
ing is remarkably sketched ; the early period when painting 
became God's priest, after having discovered 

"How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day 
Are symbols also in some deeper way;" 

the middle period when 

"her toil began to irk, 
And she sought talismans, and turned in vain 
To soulless self -reflections of man's skill;" 

and the "twilight" period, that period into which Rossetti 
himself was trying to instill life, that period in which 

"she might still 
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again, 
Ere the night cometh and she may not work." 

In both Mary Magdalene and Found Rossetti displays as 
so often elsewhere, a profound insight into the soul of 
woman. And it is surprising what a thorough, vital, and 
searching picture has been compacted within so small a 
compass. Magdalene is a magnificent study of the sudden- 
ness and completeness with which a woman may be car- 
ried away by religious fanaticism. Before her lover is quite 
aware of the change which the sight of Christ has wrought 
in her, and while he is still pressing her with words of hot 
passion, she has gone from him. 



58 University of Texas Bulletin 

"Oh loose me! See'st thou not my Bridegroom's face 
That draws me to him? For his feet my kiss, 
My hair, my tears He craves today: — and oh! 
What words can tell what other day and place 
Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His? 
He needs me, calls me, loves me: let me go!" 

Found pictures the love of woman turned to hate. Of all 
of Rossetti's pictures with which I am acquainted, none 
haunts me with anything like the insistence that does a 
study of a head for Found. In that face are concentrated 
as one could see them only in a living face, agony, hatred, 
and despair. It is the same moment of love become violent 
hate, which the poet has so incomparably caught. 

"she cries in her locked hearty — 
- 'Leave me — I do not know you — go away'!" 

Of sonnets for pictures not his own, the most notable is 
that for the Venetian pastoral of Giorgione. Therein has 
entered the splendor of the summer day — the warmth, the 
verdure, the water, the clear blue sky. The sobbing of 
the viol-strings hushes the flute-player ; she lowers the flute 
from her lips; her gaze is set; and her rapt soul reaches 
into the Infinite. Into this gathering of pleasure-seekers, 
and out of their very pleasure, steals the sense of the tran- 
sitoriness of joy; and lost in her momentary ecstacy this 
woman hears, not the sound of the viol, but the music of 
the spheres. 

"Say nothing now unto her lest she weep, 
Nor name this ever. Be it as it was, — 
Life touching lips with Immortality." 

Among others of the sonnets, not included in The House 
of Life, there are several which give new or added glimpses 
into the personality of the man and poet. There is the 
large and virile arraignment of mankind — On the Refusal 
of Aid Between the Nations — because it has lost its sense of 
family unity and is parcelled out in men ; and the upbraiding 
is the more surprising as coming from so individualistic 
a man. But he was a leader of men ; and it may be that 



Rossetti the Poet 59 

leaders are sometimes, not of, but apart from the crowd. 
It was only rarely that Rossetti expressed himself on polit- 
ical questions; but in his art was he not always individ- 
ualist and yet a leader? Untimely Lost is interesting as 
expressing, at the same time, both hope and doubt of an ex- 
istence after death. 

"A mist has risen: we see the youth no more: 

Does he see on and strive on? And may we 

Late-tottering worldworn hence, find his to be 

The young strong hand which helps us up that shore? 

Or, echoing the No More with Nevermore, 

Must night be ours and his? We hope: and he?" 

Of the sonnets on the English poets, that on Blake, which 
is perhaps the best, shows Rossetti's interest in and under- 
standing of a poet then scarcely recognized or known. 
Spring is a delightful picture, full of a love for the sheer 
beauty of the out-of-doors. That one should be happy at 
the approach of spring is natural enough; but that such 
joy should be expressed in terms of woman's love is peculiar 
to Rossetti. 

"Yet here the cuckoo and the cuckoo-flower 

Plight to the heart Spring's perfect imminent hour 

Whose breath shall soothe you like your dear one's hand." 



Chapter V 

NARRATIVE POEMS 

"She bound her green sleeve on my helm, 
Sweet pledge of love's sweet meed: 
Warm was her bared arm round my neck 
As well she bade me speed; 
And her kiss clings still between my lips, 
Heart's beat and strength at need." 

(Fragment) 

The best of Rossetti's effort as a narrative poet is to be 
found in such of his poems as Eden Bower, Sister Helen, 
The Staff and Scrip, The Bride's Prelude, Rose Mary, Dante 
at Verona, The White Ship, and The King's Tragedy; and 
to open to The Bride's Prelude or The Staff and Scrip is to 
look through 

"Charm'd magic casements op'ning on the foam 
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." 

They are redolent of cloisters, towers, quaint musical in- 
struments, old limned manuscripts, and of all that mediaeval 
setting in which Rossetti was so much at home. They are 
richly woven pictorial tapestries, suggestive of Les Lais de 
Marie de France. They are at one with such pictures as 
The Blue Closet and The Christmas Carol. 

It is noteworthy that in most of Rossetti's longer poems — 
Jenny, Sister Helen, Stratton Waters, Eden Bower, The 
Staff and Scrip, The Bride's Prelude, Rose Mary— his un- 
derlying theme is one of the psychology of woman. He 
would not consciously have labelled it thus, but for all that 
the fact remains that he was an intense and shrewd student 
of woman's inner being. He himself would probably have 
said that he was interested in woman's soul. Her soul it 
was which he was forever trying to catch in his paintings 
as in his poems ; and his success was in proportion to his 
effort : no modern artist can compare with him. 



Rossetti the Poet 61 

There is something grotesque yet sublime in the vanity 
and hatred, sprung of wounded pride, which makes the 
snake- woman Lilith enlist the help of the snake in wreaking 
her wrath on Adam and on God himself. 

"0 thou Snake, the king-snake of Eden! 
(Eden bower's in flower.) 
God's strong will our necks are under, 
But thou and I may cleave it in sunder. 

Help, sweet Snake, sweet lover of Lilith! 
(And O the bower and the hour!) 
And let God learn how I loved and hated 
Man in the image of God created! 



Lend thy shape for the shame of Eden! 

(And the bower and the hour!) 

Is not the foe-god weak as the foeman 

When love grows hate in the heart of a woman?" 

No less weird and supernatural, but perhaps rather less 
shocking than Eden Bower is Sister Helen. The splendid 
quality of the treatment in both poems owes much, no doubt, 
to the keen interest which the poet had in all phases and 
expressions of magic. Fired with jealousy and a desire for 
revenge, both Helen and Lilith are absolutely ruthless; but 
the fact that Helen is entirely human makes her seem still 
more relentless and violent. The horror which the reader 
feels in presence of the snake-woman is doubtless due to a 
natural repugnance for the snake, and more particularly 
to the added aversion which the admixture of human qual- 
ities inspires. In Sister Helen, on the other hand, the chill 
and terror come of the ghostly atmosphere with which the 
poem surrounds us. Helen is under the spell of her witch- 
craft. That quality is truly feminine in her which can not 
be content with the bodily destruction of her false lover, 
but must pursue his soul even into hell ; yet her courage is 
heroically virile when we realize that in damning her lover 
she damns herself. It is courage akin to this, w T hich, in 
Rose Mary, prompts the heroine to sacrifice her life in dis- 



62 University of Texas Bulletin 

persing the spirits of evil contained in the beryl-stone. 

In dramatic power and directness, in subtle analysis of 
mood, and in the creation of character, Sister Helen is a 
unique achievement. It is even more subtle than the ex- 
cellent Eden Bower, and is certainly more human. In so 
subjective a poet as Rossetti it is a startling performance, 
and he has given us nothing more powerful, nothing more 
eloquent of his splendid art. 

Rose Mary reveals another type of womanhood. In Lilith 
and Helen we have women of power, voluptuous and aggres- 
sive, women of soft charms, but women who can become 
veritable demons when stung to the quick. Rose Mary, on 
the other hand, is of that frailer type which seeks to lean, 
to bow down and adore, that type which must be led, which 
craves the humble task of serving as handmaiden to a lord. 
For a Lilith or a Helen who has been deceived in love, there 
is still revenge ; for a Rose Mary nothing but tears, a broken 
heart, and death. 

There is a certain resemblance between Rose Mary and 
The Bride's Prelude. In the former, Rose Mary, who has 
sinned, can no longer read aright the signs of the beryl- 
stone. What she does read is that her lover who has gone 
to be shriven, preparatory to their wedding, is safe; while 
the truth is that he has been waylaid and killed. In despair 
the girl shatters the beryl-stone and dies in the act. On her 
lover's body is found proof that he had been false to her. 
What we have of The Bride's Prelude tells of the return of 
the man who had wronged the Bride, had forsaken her, and 
was now returning to marry her because he found it advan- 
tageous. The stories resemble each other but the heroines 
are quite different. The Bride is a stronger woman than 
Rose Mary; she has suffered more, is more experienced. 
She has shed her tears and now her wrath is taking shape. 
Vengeance will be hers, we feel sure. 

A knight comes into a harried land, espouses the cause of 
the queen with whom he falls in love, and dies for her in 
the field. As token of her love and gratitude the queen keeps 
his staff and scrip hanging above her bed till her dying day. 
This is the thread of The Staff and Scrip, one of the most 



Rossetti the Poet 63 

beautiful and successful of Rossetti's narrative poems. Calm 
as an August afternoon, and suggestive of remembered 
sound and fragrance, it possesses an ecstactic and austere 
beauty akin to that of The Blessed Damosel. It is as close- 
knit as a perfect sonnet, shows wonderful skill in the hand- 
ling of the stanza, and is altogether suggestive of an old 
tapestry. 

To the contemporaries of Rossetti, notably Morris and 
Swinburne, Jenny seemed to be one of his greatest poems. 
This was natural enough, when we realize that a poet was 
taking his life in his hands in treating of a fallen woman, 
in an age which was best attuned to Enoch Arden and Arthu- 
rian idylls. It was the daring new departure which ap- 
pealed to a generation surfeited with sweets, a generation 
which was already beginning to crave for what seemed to 
it to be the realities of life. Today, the "new poetry" has 
worn the harlot, the drunkard, and other types of parasites 
threadbare, so that Jenny could not possibly shock us as it 
shocked the good Victorians. We have become callous even 
to "realistic" art, and it may be that we are about to face 
& dawn, a rebirth of the idealism which, in its art at least, 
strives to escape from the boredom, trivialities, dross, and 
ugliness which make up so much of our daily lives. And 
if the truth be told, the so-called realism is as much a devia- 
tion from the whole-truth as is idealism; in other words, 
it is a sort of idealism, a quest for the extreme, but one 
whose goal is the ugly rather than the beautiful. Realism 
can not be art, for art is selective; and realism must be a 
representation rather than a re-creation of life. 

Compared with most of the other longer poems of Ros- 
setti, Jenny is decidedly less original, subtle, and lyrical. It 
is lacking in dynamic vitality, and is mostly an account of 
the poet's reflections on Jenny. Of Jenny herself we get 
very little. And it is for this reason — because the poem is 
not a study of Jenny — that I think it an inferior product. 
We catch a glimpse of the girl's bodily beauty, but we see 
virtually nothing of her inner self. Perhaps she has pre- 
cious little soul ! 



64 University of Texas Bulletin 

"I wonder what you're thinking of. 



Perhaps you're merely glad 
That I'm not drunk or ruffianly 
And let you rest upon my knee." 

"Suppose I were to think aloud, — 
What if to her all this were said? 
Why, as a volume seldom read 
Being opened half-way shuts again, 
So might the pages of her brain 
Be parted at such words, and thence 
Close back upon the dusty sense." 

Herein lies the whole difference between Jenny and Eden 
Bower, for example. The material which the poet employs 
in Jenny is not gold, and no amount of labor or skill can 
make it gold. Jenny has no soul ; and yet it is her soul 
which we want to find in the poem, and which is not there. 
The poem on the harlot is still to be written ; and it will be 
one in which she damns her lot with a will, or justifies her- 
self so convincingly that we shall be made to realize that she 
is as justifiable, as worthy, and as nearly happy a member 
of society as any of us. 

Taking Jenny for what it is, a man's reflections on the lot 
of a prostitute, it still remains a performance not unworthy 
of Rossetti's genius. It is written in a masterly way from 
the first verse to the last ; contains many notable passages, 
such as that descriptive of lust, or this which is perhaps 
the most subtle and the most suggestive in the poem. 

"How atone 
Great God, for this which man has done? 
And for the body and soul which by 
Man's pitiless doom must now comply 
With lifelong hell, what lullaby 
Of sweet forgetful second birth 
Remains? All dark. No sign on Earth 
What measure of God's rest endows 
The many mansions of his house." 



Rossetti the Poet 65 

Jenny is marked throughout by a manly and sympathetic 
pity. The very core of that feeling is beautifully expressed 
in these two verses : 

"Poor handful of bright spring-water 
Flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face." 

Even less satisfactory than Jenny, and quite unlike any- 
thing else of Rossetti's, is A Last Confession. Of the type 
which we call dramatic monologue, it is not without a cer- 
tain interest; yet it lacks lyrical impulse and suggestion. 
It narrates rather than creates a dramatic situation; and 
when once you have read it, you have got all that it has to 
give, and you will not return to it. Its two most interesting 
features are the ominous breaking of the image of Love, 
and the cumulative circumstances of outer and inner wretch- 
edness which lead the lover to momentary madness and to 
the murder of the girl whose love he had lost. 

Quite different is Dante at Verona, wherein we have a 
vivid, sympathetic, and intuitive picture of the great Flor- 
entine at the court of Can Grande della Scala, during those 
years when Dante wandered through Italy, an exile from 
his native city. A proud lonely dreamer, dwelling aloof 
at the board of an indifferent and unappreciative host — 
such is the picture that we have of Dante, a picture which 
is for the most part creative and imaginative having as its 
core of fact the verses from the Paradiso 

"Tu proverai si come sa di sale 

Lo pane altrui e com' e duro calle 

Lo scendere e il salir per 1' altrui scale." 

Pitched in a minor key, the poem is one of those in which 
the moods are made known through the atmosphere, and 
the whole is construed in keeping with the exile's "salty 
bread" and "steep stairs," and with those moments in which 
he sought solace in solitude and in the thought of his lost 
love. 



66 University of Texas Bulletin 

"At such times, Dante, thou hast set 
Thv forehpad to the painted pane 
Full oft, I know; and if the rain 
Smote it outside, her fingers met 
Thy brow; and if the sun fell there, 
Her breath was on thy face and hair." 

And it is due to the distinct intellectual and emotional kin- 
ship of these two men that Rossetti has been able to draw 
us so sympathetic a sketch of Dante. 

The White Ship and The King's Tragedy are the only ones 
of Rossetti's ballads which are based on historical matter — 
the former dealing with the loss at sea of the son of Henry I, 
and the latter with the murder of James I of Scotland. Both 
tales are brilliantly and concisely told and are the most 
purely narrative of any of the poems. Only such asides 
of setting and atmosphere are given as are necessary to 
heighten the dramatic effects. In The White Ship the blind 
and tameless might of the sea broods over the poem like a 
bird of ill omen, as do also the prayers to God for justice 
of the people who had suffered under the tyranny of the 
king. 

"(The sea hath no King but God alone.) 



Of ruthless strokes full many an one 

He had struck to crown himself and his son; 



And when to the chase his court would crowd, 

The poor flung ploughshares on his road, 

And shrieked: 'Our cry is from King to God'!" 

The narrative is put into the mouth of the sole survivor of 
the shipwreck, a poor butcher. In a splendidly simple pass- 
age he tells how when he rose to the surface of the water 
he found another man clinging with him to a mainyard. 



Rossetti the Poet 67 

"Where lands were none 'neath the dim sea-sky, 
We told our names, that man and I. 

'0 I am Godefroy de l'Aigle hight, 
And son I am to a belted knight.' 

'And I am Berold the butcher's son 
Who slays the beasts in Rouen town'." 

A third head appears above water, that of the ship's 
captain 

"He clung, and 'What of the Prince?' quoth he. 
'Lost, lost!' we cried. He cried, 'Woe on me!' 
And loosed his hold and sank through the sea." 

The knight's strength gives out and he too sinks leaving 
Berold to be rescued at length by fishermen. Nothing of 
the horrible news is told the king until it can no longer be 
kept from him. When he hears it, he is as one struck dead ; 
and from that day forth he never smiles again. 

The King's Tragedy is the story of the murder of James I 
of Scotland by conspirators from among his courtiers. 
Though warned by an old witch-like woman of the impend- 
ing danger, the king as if under a spell, seems either power- 
less or indifferent. Nothing could be more uncanny than 
the hag's report that each time she had a vision of the king 
a shroud was enveloping him more and more. The poem 
gains in dramatic force by such touches as that in which the 
queen — as if conscious that the exalted position of her hus- 
band in itself foreboded ill — seeing "homely lovers," regrets 
that she and her king could not have been humble like them, 
and by the scene of merriment which immediately precedes 
the murder. The manliness and valor of the king, the cour- 
age of the queen, and the self-sacrifice and heroism of the 
queen's maid are all admirable in themselves; but nothing 
is as memorable as the queen's keeping her lord's embalmed 
body in state until his death has been avenged. 

"And then she said, — 'My King, they are dead!' 
And she knelt on the chapel-floor, 
And whispered low with a strange proud smile. — 
'James, James, they suffered more!' 



68 University of Texas Bulletin 

Last she stood up to her queenly height, 
But she shook like an autumn leaf, 
As though the fire wherein she burned 
Then left hr* body, and all were turned 
To ^nter of life-long grief." 

In Sister Helen the heroine is under the spell of her witch- 
craft; in Eden Bower Lilith yields to her snake-nature; in 
Rose Mary, the occult power which overwhelms the individ- 
ual is that of the spirits of evil in the beryl-stone; in The 
White Ship it is the prayers to God for vengeance, of an 
oppressed people; and here in The King's Tragedy the king 
can not escape the fate which pursues him, and which, like 
a sword of Damocles, is forever dangling above his head. 
We feel from the beginning that violent death is lying in 
wait for him, that he can not escape it. It is in this very 
quality of his ballads, in the power of the clash of the in- 
dividual with an elusive, intangible, blind, and ruthless 
force, that Rossetti reveals his dramatic insight ; and in 
the shadowy nature with which he invests this dominant 
force lies the fountain-head of his magic. 

Though primarily a lyric poet, a poet of quick, intense, 
and subtle ecstacies, Rossetti has left us, in his longer poems, 
ample proof of splendid narrative, descriptive, and dramatic 
gifts ; and in such characters as Lilith and Helen, for ex- 
ample, he has given us poetic creations as clearcut and 
alive as those of any poet we have had. 



Chapter VI 

MYSTICISM 

"Accepting me to be of those that haunt 
The vale of magical dark mysteries" 

(Dantis Tenebrae) 

-tAsk any man who has passionately loved a woman and 
lost her; ask him at what moment mysticism was forced 
upon him — at what moment he felt that he must either ac- 
cept a spiritualistic theory of the universe or go mad ; 
ask him this, and he will tell you that it was at that moment 
when he first looked upon her as she lay dead, with corrup- 
tion's foul fingers waiting to soil and stain/' Such was 
Rossetti's attitude towards mysticism, as presented by 
Watts-Dunton in the admirable picture he has given us of 
the painter-poet in Aylwin. But the cult of contemplative 
ecstacy did not suddenly dawn upon Rossetti after he had 
lost the woman whom he had passionately loved. It had 
always been a part of him, lay at the core of his first notable 
poem — The Blessed Damosel — and pervaded all his life and 
work. Dealing as it does with that which affects man, and 
yet is beyond his material control, it is closely allied to 
magic ; and it was through his mysticism, as it must needs 
have been, that he attained to his loftiest flights and most 
subtle depths. 

Yet one must speak cautiously of Rossetti's mysticism. 
He is universally and peremptorily labeled a mystic, and 
the question stops there. One reads The Blessed Damosel. 
and exclaims, "Oh, yes; here is a poet who communes di- 
rectly with a blessed spirit; he is a mystic." But this is 
only a half-truth ; and we must carry the question further, 
examine this mysticism more carefully, and, if we can, dis- 
cover the whole truth. In the first place, if by mysticism 
we mean the direct communion of the individual with God. 
we must know what Rossetti meant by God. At best he is 
"foggy" and ambiguous on this question. He sometimes 



70 University of Texas Bulletin 

thinks of God in the Christian sense of a Supreme Being 
apart from and superior to man; sometimes as the Over- 
soul, the fountain-head and ultimate goal of all life; some- 
times as the happiness attained in perfect love ; and in gen- 
eral as whatever is beyond man's control. Moreover, God 
rarely enters into Rossetti's sphere, and when he does it is 
always in a secondary way. So there is nothing of what 
would commonly be called the religious element in this mys- 
ticism. God is not sought, and if found, it is merely inci- 
dentally. This mysticism begins and ends with love. If 
there is a fusion of the individual with God, it is accom- 
plished through love; but in the process that primal love is 
not lost, is not displaced by a different or greater love. 
There are no degrees of love, as in Plato; love of man or 
woman, love of society, love of God. There is but one stage, 
and we do not pass from love to God, but may attain God in 
love. To love is to reach the summum bonum, to be at one 
with it; and love with Rossetti is always love of man and 
woman. So his is a unique mysticism; one which seeks 
peace in the unity, the entity of man. Man and woman are 
the factors of that potential entity; and love is achieved 
when the potential entity has become a reality. 

"How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, 
When by the new birth borne abroad 
Throughout the music of the suns, 
It enters in her soul at once 
And knows the silence there for God!" 

"Lady, I fain would tell how evermore 

Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor 

Thee from myself, neither our love from God." 

That Rossetti was religious — in the large sense of the 
word — can not be denied, and will not be denied except by 
him who exacts that we all worship his particular Gods. 
But let us be understood; Rossetti's goal was Beauty, his 
religion the cult of Beauty, and his high-priest Love. Ele- 
ments of other creeds, of the mediaeval church, for example, 
he used as symbols for his own ; but they were merely sym- 



Rossetti the Poet 71 

bols, appealing to his aesthetic rather than his religious 
sense. 

Life offers us many signs if we can but seize and inter- 
pret them: intimations of pre-existence and forecasts of 
what our lot will be after death. A swallow soars overhead, 
the beloved turns to watch it, and as she turns, the curve 
of her neck flashes upon her lover's inner eye and he is 
suddenly aware that he has loved her before, long ago, some- 
how, somewhere. Then he reflects; since he has loved her 
before this his earthly existence, will not that pre-natal 
love be his again after death ; and is not the earthly sojourn 
only a momentary obstacle in the way of the perfect and 
eternal love? Or it may be that as man goes through life 
in quest of the perfect partner from whom birth has sepa- 
rated him, he suddenly comes upon her and recognizes her as 

"One nearer kindred than life hinted of." 

Or again, it may be the sound of music which recalls one's 
ancestral home, speaks to one of one's former existence and 
of that which is to come, shows the transitoriness of the 
earthly life, and gives one courage to pursue the journey 
to the end. A more subtle and authentic message than this 
of The Monochord, y it could scarcely be granted a poet tc 
utter. 

Life is merely an interruption in, a temporal barrier tc 
the perfect love, and death marks the "new birthday," the 
soul's actual re-birth. Death reunites lovers and brings to 
fruition love which had been imperfect on earth. The oc- 
cult power which defies time, space, and other material ele- 
ments, transcends sleep as well; and Love, the keeper of 
sleep, may bring together lovers whom waking hours had 
found far apart. 

What I have said thus far represents one phase of Ros- 
setti's faith, that phase which we find expressed in The 
Blessed Damosel, Love's Nocturn, The Stream's Secret, The 
Song of The Bower, Sudden Light, The Staff and Scrip, 
Bridal Birth, The Birth-Bond, and many other poems ; yet 
even this mystic faith was not without having been shaken 



72 University of Texas Bulletin 

by the doubt of the nineteenth century, and in the bitterly 
sad Without Her it is completely wanting. The group of 
sonnets entitled Willowwood presents the futility of hope in 
love. It might be clearer, but that is because the whole is 
"so meshed with half-remembrance hard to free." The mes- 
sage, however, is unmistakable; and the pictorial setting is 
no less striking than it is clear. The lover sits with Love 
beside a well, and as the lover stoops to drink, Love, as with 
a magic wand, disturbs the water with his foot and wing 
and causes his reflection to become that of the lover's be- 
loved. As the lips of the lovers meet at the well's brink 
Love sings to the accompaniment of his lute, exhorting his 
votaries to make the most of love today, and as he sings the 
ghosts of the lovers' allotted days appear and add to Love's 
exhortation. As the song ends the lovers' kiss uncloses, 
and as the lover sees the face of his beloved fall back through 
the water his heart wells with the agony of despair ; he has 
perhaps looked upon that face for the last time. Even love 
is short-lived, is indeed a thing to be grasped when offered 
or utterly lost. 

"So when the song died did the kiss unclose; 
And her face fell back drowned, and was as gray 
As its gray eyes; and if it ever may 
Meet mine again I know not if Love knows" 

Here is the climax of Willowwood; and in the verses which 
I have italicized is the supreme cry of one whose doubt over- 
shadowed his faith. Nothing more poignant is to be found 
in Rossetti. He wished to believe in love at least, but for 
the moment he could not ; and to doubt love was to doubt all. 
for to him love was the one good granted to man. 

It might be difficult to say which attitude, that of faith 
or of doubt, was the prevailing one with Rossetti, though I 
suspect that it was that of faith. The bulk of his work 
would surely point in that direction; and in winding up 
The House of Life with the sonnet The One Hope he chose 
to make his last stand one for faith. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE HOUSE OF LIFE 

"This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise 

Thy voice and hand shake still, — long known to thee 

By flying hair and fluttering hem, — the beat 

Following her daily of thy heart and feet, 

How passionately and irretrievably, 

In what fond flight, how many ways and days!" 

(Soul's Beauty) 

Through an arbor hung with exotic vines we enter into 
a deep grove of indistinct trees, yet trees whose foliage is 
so thick that only an occasional sunbeam can sift through. 
Here and there we catch between the tree-trunks vistas of 
far away hills and sunny fields. On every hand are densely 
grown flowers which give off a permeating fragrance as of 
lilies and roses. Now and then we catch the song of a bird. 
As we advance along the lanes we pass pools and wells of 
deep undisturbed water, and meet with shadowy personages 
who look half -familiar and who remind us of old loves and 
of past joys and sorrows. An abrupt turn and we are 
suddenly aware that the sky is overcast ; a low wind moans 
through the trees, and the waters of the well near which we 
have stopped seem darker and forebodingly deeper. As we 
lean over the brink, a bird sings overhead, and gazing into 
the well we seem to see — though only indistinctly — faces 
not wholly unlike our own, worn and drawn faces which 
show clearly that love and life has had their way with them. 
We quicken our steps and advance to the outer edge of the 
grove. The wind is lulled, the clouds break away, and we 
emerge into the hopeful sunlight of day with something of 
the spiritual lift which Dante experienced, when, out of an 
oppressive atmosphere, he came forth to rebehold the stars. 
This grove through which we have wandered, and wherein 
we have found a forecast of our own spiritual experiences, 
is The House of Life. 



74 University of Texas Bulletin 

The House of Life is the record of a poet's intellectual and 
emotional life. These poems extend from Rossetti's youth 
to his last years, and they are thoroughly suffused with his 
intense and robust personality. Into none of his work has 
he put so much fundamental brainwork, so much of his in- 
delible self. Only Patmore and Meredith, among our poets, 
have studied nuptial love as intimately as has Rossetti ; yet 
their methods so differed from his that those poets can 
hardly be compared with him. Patmore is a moralist sys- 
tematically proving a thesis ; Meredith is a psychologist ex- 
amining love rationally ; while Rossetti is the artist, selecting 
and catching the moods as they pass. And it is because 
he is selective that he is- the artist, and it is also for the same 
reason that there is no other phase of continuity in the son- 
nets of The House of Life than that of their general theme. 
To object to the poet's choice of title for this group of poems, 
is to convict oneself of not understanding him; for to him 
love was very nearly all that there was in life, and it never 
would have seemed to him that his title was either too am- 
bitious or in need of justification. Nor need one assume 
that the poet was over-mindful of the astrological term 
"house of life" ; for the artist's world is his only world, and 
it is this world which Rossetti has roofed over with The 
House of Life. Many of the sonnets comprised show clearly 
that "the house of love" would have been an insufficient title. 
There are many mansions in this house, and it is in fact, to 
him who seeks heaven in Beauty, the house of life. 

To Rossetti woman was the most compelling of the mani- 
fest forms of Beauty, and The House of Life is the expres- 
sion, in part, of his reaction to that beauty. His whole life 
was one of intensive introspection, of the quest within his 
own soul of that of which he caught glimpses without ; and 
it is the depth, the subtleness, and the universality of his 
vision which take us back to him time and again. 

There is no very noticeable progression in the manner of 
Rossetti's poetry, his earliest being very much at one with 
his latest, though it must be said that with the fullness of 
experience and the maturity of middle and later life the 



Rossetti the Poet 75 

poet became more and more the interpreter of elusive moods, 
and as he strove to present them in succinct and suggestive 
speech he developed verbal idiosyncracies which were almost 
non-English. I have in mind such overfull verses as the 
following, for example. - 

"The speech-bound sea-shell's low importunate strain" 

"Some prisoned moon in steep cloud-fastnesses" 
"And penury's sedulous self-torturing thought" 

Occasionally too, there is an involved construction which 
will mar an otherwise beautiful poem; and yet in spite of 
this, and in spite of such other shortcomings in Rossetti's 
craftsmanship as those of which I have spoken in another 
chapter, The House of Life remains the most carefully and 
beautifully wrought body of lyric poetry in the language. 
It is deep-fruited with spiritual experience, with an abso- 
lutely unique imagination, with incomparable virility, with 
a dynamic quest of beauty, with passion and a subtle under- 
standing of it, and with an economy and felicity of expres- 
sion never compassed by other lyric poets except sporadi- 
cally. 

I have said before that Rossetti's was the ecstacy of con- 
templation, an ecstacy which is natural and spontaneous 
in its impulse, but which finds expression only after having 
been carefully and deliberately sifted and measured. It 
has nothing of the so-called "lyric cry" of this, for example, 

"The sea! the sea! the open sea! 
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!" 

is not impelled and quickened by the flow of language, as 
was Swinburne's, but is selective, and expresses its inten- 
sity by its sense of restraint and order. It is this ecstacy 
which the poet is describing, in the beautiful sonnet called 
Broken Music, when he says : 

"mid doubts and fears 
Thus oft my soul has hearkened; till the song, 
A central moan for days, at length found tongue, 
And the sweet music welled and the sweet tears." 



76 University of Texas Bulletin 

It is this ecstacy which is the life-breath of The House of 
Life. 

The earlier portions of the series are given over largely 
to the praise of love and woman ; but the general tone is one 
of melancholy, arising out of life's disillusionment. As 
early as the second sonnet death is imminent, and in the 
fourth is a forecast of what was to be a reality all too soon. 

"0 love, my love! if I no more should see 
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, 
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, — 
How then should sound upon life's darkening slope 
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, 
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" 

And who that has followed in the ways of Beauty has not 
feared and heard the ground-whirl of those leaves and the 
wind of Death's wing? Beauty too, like earth and man, 
has its fall as well as its spring; and it is the perishable 
quality of its manifestations, perhaps more than any other, 
which gives it the supreme place in the human heart and 
makes it akin to our strength, desires, hopes, despair, and 
resignation. 

^Disillusionment and death are dominant notes in The 
House of Life, and even in love's seemingly perfect hour, 
when the lover is secretly counting up love's gold, shadows 
steal across his heart. Youth with its inexperience, with 
its infinite capacity for dreaming and its very limited power 
to achieve embraces love with the blind faith that heaven 
is scaled at last; but "Hope sows what Love shall never 
reap," and heaven awaits those lovers only who cherish 

"This test for love: in every kiss sealed frst 
To feel the first kiss and forbode the last." 

As the series advances, the poet's experience broadens, 
and sonnets in praise of love and the beloved give way more 
and more to sonnets expressing various other moments in 
the spiritual life of the lover of Beauty. The sonnet has not 
been made to function as a stanza, but has remained an en- 



Rossetti the Poet 11 

tity, so that we may examine the individual sonnets, much 
as we might the paintings in a gallery, without too much 
attention to their numerical order. 

Elsewhere I have said that with Rossetti love of body, 
of the soul, and of God were. of ten one; and without neces- 
sarily implying that the three marked three phases in an 
upward progression, he sometimes differentiated very clearly 
between love of the body and love of the soul. This was the 
case in the two sonnets, Body's Beauty and Soul's Beauty, 
sonnets written for two of his own pictures, and originally 
entitled Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera, but afterwards, with 
the titles changed, included in The House of Life. In Body's 
Beauty, woman with her sweet voice and golden hair 

"Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave, 
Till heart and body and life are in its hold." 

Herself the unconscious servant of the race, she breaks 
man's will as an individual and bends his neck to bear with 
her the yoke which the race imposes. There is something 
electric, awesome, and irresistible in the casting of her spell, 
something to remind one of Michelangelo's fresco, in the 
Sistine Chapel, wherein we see God stretching out his hand 
to communicate the spark of life to Adam. 

"Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went 
Thy spell through him and left his straight neck bent, 
And round his heart one strangling golden hair." 

Soul's Beauty marks the soul's quest after its ideal Beauty ; 
glimpsing it now in some aspect of the sea, now of the sky, 
and now of woman. Beauty lights the way, and the lover 
follows irretrievably on and ever on 

"In what fond flight, how many ways and days!" 

And Rossetti's art — painting and poetry — is the record of 
the fond flights and the ways and days in which he has fol- 
lowed Beauty ; and she has never before so absorbed a man, 
nor has she ever had another such votary ! 

To few lovers indeed is it granted to enshrine the beloved 



78 University of Texas Bulletin 

in art, and to fewer still to enshrine her in more than one 
form of art. The lover finds, after having sung his lady's 
praise in poetry, that her beauty eludes him still and that 
there remains much to be said. He lays by his pen, takes 
up his brush, and, hopeful of catching her at last, attempts 
her portrait. Yet, when all is said and done he realizes that 
what he has been seeking is, not his lady, but Beauty — she 
whom one may discern but may never attain. In The Por- 
trait, he makes the daring and ambitious appeal to Love 
that it be granted him to paint the beloved so well that those 
who look on her portrait may know 

"The very sky and sea-line of her soul"; 

and to such a worshipper, Love is so far propitious that 
when the portrait is done 

"The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss, 
The shadowed eyes remember and foresee. 
Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note 
That in all years (0 love, thy gift is this!) 
They that would look on her must come to me." 

Of the three beautiful sonnets entitled True Woman, the 
most remarkable, I think, is the second, that called Her Love; 
for it reveals an understanding of woman's love, rarely pos- 
sessed by man. Woman's love, unlike man's, is neither im- 
pulsive nor aggressive, but reflective, passive, receptive, and 
constant withal. Hers is the love that yields, that gives. 

"Yet as morn springs or twilight sinks to rest, 
Ah! who shall say she deems not loveliest 
' The hour of sisterly sweet hand-in-hand?' ' 

Her love's quintessence is in its power to console, to soothe, 
to hearten; in its "sisterly sweet hand-in-hand" quality. 
It is not creative, but restful ; not of a kind to excite desire, 
but to allay it. This surely is of the very essence of sym- 
pathy. 

As in the gallery one might turn from one type of paint- 
ings to another, so here let us turn to see love given the 



Rossetti the Poet 79 

splendid out-of-door settings that we find in Youth's Spring 
Tribute and Silent Noon. The two sonnets resemble each 
other, for both are exhortations to grasp love's swift-footed 
hour ; but in the former April is ushering in the spring, and 
in the latter "the noonday stands still for heat." 

"On this sweet bank your head thrice sweet and dear 

I lay, and spread your hair on either side, 

And see the newborn woodflowers bashful-eyed 

Look through the golden tresses here and there. 

On these debateable borders of the year 

Spring's foot half-f alters : scarce she yet may know 

The leafless hawthorn-blossoms from the snow; 

And through her bowers the wind's way still is clear." 

"Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, — 

The finger points look through like rosy blooms: 

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. 

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, 

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge 

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge. 

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass." 

One need not comment upon description which contains such 
graphic and incomparable strokes as 

"On these debateable borders of the year 
Spring's foot half-falters" 



and 



'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. 



I have already said that death was imminent on the very 
threshold of The House of Life, and in the desolate cry of 
Without Her we shudder with the chill of its dank breath. 
Love itself is dead ; and all things are dead save the lover's 
great sorrow and his bitterly grieving heart. And notice) 
in these verses, how the heart's loneliness and despair in-] 
crease as life's horizon of barren ways and years expands! 
before it. ' 



80 University of Texas Bulletin 

"What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart, 
Of thee what word remains ere speech be still? 
A wayfarer by barren ways and chill, 
Steep ways and weary, without her thou art, 
Where the long- cloud, the long wood's counterpart, 
Sheds doubled darkness up the laboring hill." 

Let us look now at sonnets which depict sundry moods. 
First there is Autumn Idleness, the sestette of which is so 
thoroughly suffused with the haze and quiet of Autumn, 
and which sums up in its closing verses, the very spirit of 

listlessness. 

"While I still lead my shadow o'er the grass, 
Nor know for longing that which I should do." 

Then there is The Hill Summit with its gorgeous sunset 
and its spiritual suggestion of isolation, and almost of dis- 
may, in the verses 

"And now that I have climbed and won this height, 
I must tread downward through the sloping shade 
And travel the bewildered tracks till night." 

He who has watched with longing and regret, the sun set- 
ting beyond a perfect day will find his heart following after 
"the last bird" of the closing verse. And with what a 
growing sense of passing into a great unknown do we fol- 
low this bird as he vanishes "into the last light. " 

"Yet for this hour I still may here be stayed 
And see the gold air and the silver fade 
And the last bird fly into the last light." 

The Choice — a group of three sonnets, which because of 
their nKiraJizing^tone are hardly characteristic of RossettL 
and in spite of it are strong and altogether worthy — pre- 
sents the attitude of the voluptuary, the preacher, and the 
imaginative creator^ The voluptuary thinks 

"Surely the earth, that's wise being very old, 
Needs not our help" 



Rossetti the Poet 81 

and he condemns those 

"who increase 
Vain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way! 
Through many years they toil; then on a day 
They die not, — for their life was death, — but cease; 
And round their narrow lips the mould falls close." 

Assuredly, there is something convincing in the scorn of the 
lip as it curls to enunciate that last verse ! The preacher 
admonishes us, saying: 

"Cover thy countenance, and watch, and fear;" 

And the man who is not content with living on the fruit of 
his fellows' toil, pushes on, knowing that though he reach 
the ultimate confines of man's achievement, 

"Still leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea." 

Picture a man come to a halt mid-way in his life, in doubt 
as to whether the journey is worth pursuing any further, 
and looking back over the past wondering what it is that 
has urged him thus far 

"Those unknown things or these things overknown" 

and you have something of what the poet has given us in 
From Dawn to Noon. It is heartening and fascinating, 
though in Rossetti not startling but quite natural, to find 
the voluptuary an ascetic; and that is what we have in 
Retro Me Sathana — Art's ascetic, who cares nothing for the 
worldliness of worldlings, and whose only path is the nar- 
row one which leads to the understanding and contempla- 
tion of Beauty. 

Now if we turn once more, we may examine still another 
part of The House of Life, the largest part, that part which 
mourns lost joys, lost hopes, lost days — all that man sets 
his heart upon and in the end finds vain. It is because this^ 
part is the largest that the general tone of The House of Life j 
is melancholy; and whether the beauty of decline is more/ 
poignant than that of growth, I do not know ; but I do feel \ 



82 University of Texas Bulletin 

f that this sonnet sequence owes most to its sombre side. 
,r Tis here that we find Stillborn Love, the love which might 
have been yet never was ; Inclusiveness wherein an earthly 
setting may be associated by a spirit in heaven with the re- 
membrance of a good deed, while the self -same setting to 
one in hell calls up only a vain memory ; and Known in Vain. 
which tells of effort and will, both good in themselves, but 
rendering life futile by being forever at variance. I can 
not pass over these sonnets without calling attention to the 
originality, amounting to grotesqueness, of the imagination 
displayed in this quatrain from Inclusiveness. <jT 

< "What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood 
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? — 
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes 
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?" 

A vain task will be his who looks for "literary influences" 
in a poet who writes verses like these ! 

To this same category of sonnets which sing the vanity 
of vain things, belong Willowwood, The Landmark, Hoarded 
Joy, Farewell To The Glen, Lost Days, Lost On Both Sides, 
A Superscription, and Newborn Death. They are beautiful 
songs, sad but always virile; and since I have said enough 
to show what a conspicuous part they play in The House of 
Life, I shall not attempt to give in paraphrase what Ros- 
setti has put into these the loveliest of his poems. No para- 
phrase could do them justice. One word more. In New- 
born Death, the poet has come to life's last relay, and look- 
ing back and beholding Love, and Song, and Art, he de- 
spairs, thinks that all has been vain, and wonders whether 
he has served these three that Life, in the end, might yield 
him nothing but Death. 

" At the beginning of this chapter The House of Life was 
compared with a grove.» It might also be likened to a 
temple. Through the sombre alcoves and aisles of this 
temple we have followed the Great Lover, marvelling at 
each perfect portal, arch, window, and frieze, which go tc 
make up the perfect whole, now loitering in the dim sun- 
beams stealing through the colored glass-, now aghast before 



Rossetti the Poet 83 

some ominous suggestion of death ; and now, finally, we have 
entered into the holy of holies, into a luminous tabernacle,, 
where on the altar stands the erect and radiant figure of 
The One Hope. On the pedestal is an inscription, and there 
we read Life's answer to the question which the poet had 
put to it in Newborn Death. 

"When vain desire at last and vain regret 

Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 

What shall assuage the unforgotten pain 

And teach the unforgetful to forget? 

Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, — 

Or may the soul at once in a green plain 

Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain 

And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet? 

Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air 

Between the scriptured petals softly blown 

Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,- — 

Ah ! let none other alien spell soe'er 

But only the one Hope's one name be there, — 

Not less nor more, but even that word alone." 



CHAPTER VIII 
CONCLUSION 

It is perhaps impossible to say of Rossetti's poetry that 
one part is more characteristic of his genius than another ; 
his ballads are as unmistakably his as is The House of Life; 
and all is admirably wrought. He is never concerned with 
anything less than the quintessence of poetry, never breathes 
anything but clear ether. He belongs to that school of art- 
ists who do comparatively little, but who do that little as 
nearly perfectly as is humanly possible. In France he would 
have been admitted to the Academy, if he had cared for such 
a distinction, as was Heredia with his little book — Les 
Trophees. In The House of Life he has given us an in- 
imitable body of lyric poetry. To match it on any ground 
it would be necessary to cull a nosegay from English lyric 
poetry of all times ; and even such a garland would of neces- 
sity lack the uniform excellence of matter and manner which 
is The House of Life's. Then there are the ballads, such as 
Sister Helen, Eden Bower, Rose Mary, The King's Tragedy . 
and such of the more purely lyric poems as The Blessed 
Damosel, The Stream's Secret, The Cloud Confines, and The 
Sea Limits. Not only are all of these excellent; they are 
unique. They mark a new departure in English poetry. 

Rossetti was too analytical, too thoughtful to be lyrical. 
He was wary of what is spontaneously expressed, knowing 
that all gushing waters are not pure, in fact are seldom 
pure. They have the virtue of impetus, to be sure, but 
unless their beds are solid the waters are very likely to be 
charged with sediment. Those poets are very few whose 
work might not have been improved by a more deliberate 
craftsmanship. Rossetti possessed a virile and spontaneous 
inspiration, but true artist that he was, he scorned slovenly 
workmanship and revered what was impeccable. And per- 
haps the most remarkable feature of his craftsmanship is 
this, that in polishing he did not fret away the initial core 



Rossetti the Poet 85 

of his inspiration. He was not content with embellishing 
his verses, he must strengthen them. Were not his work 
as a whole of so uniform an excellence, we might often ac- 
cept as spontaneous what is really deliberate. He is con- 
stantly giving us what seems like the inevitable word or 
phrase, beguiling us into believing that what he weighed 
very carefully has fallen casually from his lips — achieving 
thus the very highest that art can achieve. How deliberately 
he worked, and with what results, can be readily seen if 
one examines the first and last version of certain of his 
poems. 

Rossetti was almost never a moralist. Those poems, as 
Jenny, in which he did moralize are fortunately few, and 
are never among his best. And it may be precisely because 
he did not moralize that he has not been more popular. In 
another than an Anglo-Saxon country, it might have been 
different; but what fate may the lover of beauty expect at 
the hands of a people, who, if the could, would make Shake- 
speare out to be a preacher? In Italy there is room for a 
Petrarch, a Carducci, a D'Annunzio ; in France for a Villom 
a Musset, a Verlaine ; but in England and America they ex- 
act "high seriousness" of an artist, and not as an artist. 
for no artist has ever been more serious than Rossetti, but 
a high seriousness which makes for puritanism and mo- 
rality. 

Recently I have been reading letters written by Mr. J. B. 
Yeats to his son the poet, in which the father says something 
to this effect, that what can be explained is not poetry. With- 
out pretending to understand this statement, which itself 
may not be explainable, I suspect that it points in the same 
direction as does Rossetti's poetry. Poetry should be ad- 
dressed to the imagination, not the understanding; should 
suggest, not narrate ; should be concerned with moods rather 
than facts. And because Rossetti's poetry is of this kind is 
perhaps the reason why he is Greek to the philistines and 
oracle to the poets. It is much more nearly true of him than 
of Shelley that he is a poet's poet. Shelley is too often rapt 
in social reform. Rossetti is pure gold ; but has little or no 
significance to those who either care nothing for the beauty 



86 University of Texas Bulletin 

of pure gold or must mix their gold with alloy in order that 
they may coin it. 

Original, rich in color, palpably imaginative, sincere, 
virile, and melancholy — such is Rossetti's poetry; and al- 
though it has profited by the great tradition of English 
poetry, it stands apart from it more distinctly than that of 
any other great poet. It is not a continuation, but an addi- 
tion. In the great stream of English poetry, his is a cove, 
not deriving much impetus from the current above nor yield- 
ing much to that below; but a more glorious cove, one of 
deeper waters and more luxuriant banks, is not to be found 
along the entire length of that splendid stream. Here will 
sojourn those who move calmly, deliberately, and determined 
to enjoy as they go, not those who rush headlong with the 
current not knowing where they are going nor why. And 
yet, although his contribution is not one of influence, but of 
the thing in itself — his poetry — he has given us, in his son- 
nets, a measuring-rod and fixed the standard. Since his 
day the bipartite sonnet has enjoyed a vogue which it had 
never known before, has been used almost exclusively, and 
has met with a success due in a large part to a more or less 
conscious adherence to the principles which his sonnets em- 
body. 

JEn France romanticism came to mean the lacrymose vent- 
ing of the individual's indolence and boredom ; in England, 
whence it had passed to France, it was much more robust 
and sincere, and expressed the revolt of the individual, his 
breaking away from a too constraining society, his expres- 
sion of the self, and his refuge in the elemental and larger 
phases of Nature; in Rossetti it reached its high-water 
mark — the contemplation of the sad beauty of the conquest 
of the individual by the Race. 

"he on honey-dew hath fed 
And drunk the milk of Paradise." 




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